by Andrea Ruse
Larger class sizes and fewer teachers look like a certainty for the Manhattan Beach Unified School District next year.
At last week’s school board meeting, district officials began the difficult task of slashing $4 million from their $50 million budget. The district, after already absorbing $4 million in cuts last year, again finds itself in the position of preparing for another round of reductions in state education funding.
“Our state is in a terrible mess and the way they’ve decided to solve this problem is by cutting programs,” Manhattan Beach Board of Education President Ida Vander Poorte said. “Everybody sitting up here has anguished over what we are going to do to balance the budget. But we have to balance it.”
Superintendent Bev Rohrer noted that California now ranks 50th in the country in per-pupil education funding.
Board President Ida Vander Poorte said that this is the fifth year in a row as a board member that she has had to contemplate cutting programs.
“We’re basically changing what education has always been in Manhattan Beach and we have no choice in the matter,” Vander Poorte said. “They are truly changing the face of education, not only in Manhattan Beach, but in the entire state.”
The board is considering expanding the student-teacher ratio for kindergarten through third grade classes from 23:1 to 29:1. Grades six through 12 classes may increase from 20:1 to roughly 25:1.
The board also proposed reducing counseling services at Mira Costa High School and Manhattan Beach Middle School.
Those two cuts alone would get the district roughly half way to its $4 million goal.
The other $2 million in reductions will likely come from cuts originally proposed during last year’s budget crisis, including library, physical education, science, and reading programs. The school board had at that time issued pink slips to as many as 80 teachers.
A combination of emergency funding — including $2.8 million from the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation and $1.3 million from the city — enabled the district to balance its budget last year without making the proposed cuts. The jobs of roughly 40 teachers who had been pink-slipped were saved.
A $4.1 million donation by MBEF this year will again this year make a bad situation less dire.
“If we didn’t have $4 million coming from the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, we’d be looking at $8 million in cuts,” Vander Poorte said.
The state, despite slashing more than $20 billion from its budget in July, faces a projected $7 billion revenue shortfall this year — a deficit that is expected to grow by at least another $12 billion next year.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed $1.5 billion in education cuts.
The district won’t know the exact size of education funding cuts until the state passes its budget, which will happen in June at the earliest.
The school board faces a March 15 deadline to notify teachers of layoffs.
“There is a slim hope and prayer depending on other things that we’ll find a solution, but we have to be ready,” board member Ellen Rosenberg said of the impending layoffs.
The district is also looking at ways to protect programs in spite of its dwindling budget, such as sharing resources with surrounding school districts. For example, the district currently shares a school nurse with the Hermosa Beach School District.
“We’re all in this together,” Rohrer said. “That’s why it is so important we work together as a team. We can’t solve this locally. We have to go to the state and say, ‘Enough is enough.’” ER
