The Hermosa Beach city school board is inching closer to asking voters for more money, with plans to survey the electorate on its willingness to pay a parcel tax, or a special sales tax, to cover shortfalls caused by state budget cuts over the past few years.
A competing option for the future of the public schools, converting one or both of Hermosa’s campuses to charter school status, remains alive. A volunteer committee, including enthusiastic supporters, said it will return to the school board in about two months with more information.
The option of a new tax, usually discussed as a parcel tax, has gained more momentum than any other possibility under study by teams of board members and volunteers, who have spent months looking into the future of Hermosa’s small, 1,300-student district.
Officials estimate that a tax of $200 per property parcel, and more for commercial and multi-unit residential parcels, would raise about $1.6 million a year.
Seniors would be exempt, and officials have kicked around the idea of a three-to-five year life for the tax.
A special 1 percent sales tax for the schools would generate an estimated $1.5 million per year, a special committee has found. That tax would not apply to groceries and medical items.
Either tax would require a two-thirds majority of Hermosa voters, and a special sales tax would require a four-fifths vote of the City Council to place it on the ballot.
Educators say Hermosa’s K-8 school district has experienced a $1.7 million shortfall over the last five years, and further state cuts to education remain a possibility.
Since 2007, school programs axed or reduced include an instructional aide at the kindergarten-through-second-grade Hermosa View School, an assistant principal, music for grades one through five, middle school academic counseling, aides for middle school technology and fourth- and fifth-grade science, a maintenance and operations coordinator, an operations worker, hours for a library/media technician at the second-through-eighth-grade Hermosa Valley School, health aides at both schools, and two clerical workers.
For the school year just beginning, parents and other community members raised money to save a third-through-fifth-grade science lab, first-through-fifth-grade physical education, a program to limit class sizes in kindergarten through third grade, the middle school electives of art, technology, computers, Spanish, music, speech and drama, and a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade reading specialist.
For a second year, teachers and all other district employees will take five unpaid furlough days.
The last time the city school district got more money from voters was 2002, when they approved a bond issue that built classrooms, a library and a controversial gymnasium at Valley School.
In 2006 voters rejected a second bond measure, and in 2008 they slapped down a parcel tax by a margin of 53 to 47 percent, 20 percentage points below the two-thirds majority required for passage.
