Observing last night’s belt-tightening School Board meeting — many families did, the overflow crowd snaking out the door and branching off in two directions — was like covering a fog-shrouded war that had no beginning, no ending, no middle and a multitude of mis-shapen moving parts.
To satisfy the looming deadline of a state mandate to balance the budget, the School Board was confronted with executing an unknown number of personnel cuts, somewhere in the dozens.
Maybe. But nothing seemed irrevocably clear.
The proportion of layoffs and cancelled programs was determined by conflicting — and periodically changing — government regulatory requirements.
In the words of Board member Scott Zeidman, “A lot was said, but almost nothing was accomplished — pursuant to the law as a way to cover our collective rear ends.”
Because the determinative state and federal budgets are miles, and perhaps months, from being finalized, these springtime decisions by the School Board could be reversed in late spring, as many were last year.
Just before 2 o’clock this morning, after two Board members had been resting their eyes, or something, Supt. Dr. Myrna Rivera Cote said what others only were thinking, “That’s it.”
The Longest Day
For Board members, this concluded an 8 1/2-hour meeting. But considerably more amazing was that between 15 and 20 persons stubbornly, loyally remained in the audience —among them two noted Board watchdogs, Alan Elmont and George Laase.
The spirited audience was as much of the story as the professional educators and elected officials sitting at a semi-circular desk in the front of the room.
The audience could have been the leftover cast from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” so heartbreakingly passionate and modest were they — students and grownups — as they desperately, almost tearfully, tried to rescue much loved teachers and programs.
Their hopes remain alive today because the assertedly convoluted legal apparatus governing conduct of the meeting remains a fluid rather than settled matter.
Sharing the star spotlight with the audience was David El Fattal, assistant superintendent for business services.
Because he specializes in crystallized communication, the longtime businessman was assigned to be the evening’s chief interpreter of maddeningly complicated rules and regulations that are intended to have narrow application.
Not One Voice Raised
Proof that Mr. El Fattal succeeded in his undesirable task was that through 7 solid hours of faultless, fairly succinct interpretations — on a night when many felt distraught — no one raised a single word of criticism against him.
This was not like shopping in an overcrowded market 30 seconds before closing. The ambience was far more convivial. Feeling uncommon pressure, families and educators were remarkably collegial.
Tempers were deposited at the door on the way in.
The eloquence of hours of ardent, moving pleas by teachers, by parents and by students will stand as a patriotic tribute to the community, and it is on tape. Channel 35 will rebroadcast the proceedings.
What Do These Words Mean?
Given the dense and arcane locution of the public education world, watching the School Board struggle to understand vague concepts and abstract terms that were supposed to be signposts en route to painful personnel decisions, one man said the evening was like watching an early sci-fi film, “unrealistic.”
By the end, the School Board made a small dent in the evening’s mountainous agenda.
They took two actions.
In meeting a somewhat filmy state mandate for the School District to balance its budget, members reluctantly approved lowering a tentative axe onto the necks of 43 teachers.
Heaviest hit were the Culver City Middle School and Culver City High School, but tentacles of the starving budget reached into numerous corners of employment.
By law, potentially vulnerable personnel must be informed of their pending status by March 15.
The teacher layoffs, scheduled to take effect July 1, not only are not necessarily final, it could be a relatively long time before the instructors learn their irreversible fate.
In the second action, the School Board’s reluctance to order personnel trimmings without more than perceived skimpy evidence that an urgency existed, mushroomed as the evening wore on.
Under the category of District Office Budget Cuts, 53 separate possibilities were listed.
The listings commonly were vague, such as “District-wide energy savings” and “reduce and utilize in the General Fund the allocated/reserved IMRFP textbook funds.”
Such generic concepts prompted a flow of questions from School Board members, although the record should show that besides Mr. El Fattal, several other persons in the room appeared to comprehend the arcanity of it all.
One Line at a Time
As Board President Jessica Beagles-Roos recited each item, audience members were invited to contribute their comments, one item at a time.
While this pleased a large segment of the curious and the puzzled, during the first 2 1/2 hours, Dr. Beagles-Roos only was able to wade through 18 listings, one-third of the total.
As a result, the School Board ending up shaving only 6 of the potential 53 listings.
They were “Freezes of non-essential purchases, travel conferences, new hires, vacancy replacement,” “renegotiate contracts [for] parent notification system and copy machines,” “renegotiate website contract,” “District-wide energy savings,” “Board members travel allowance,” and “reduce and utilize in the General Fund the allocated/reserved IMRFP textbook funds.”
Lin Howe School teacher/coach Casey Chabola’s description of the evening’s impenetrable, helter-skelter guidelines for decision-making can provide an appropriate epitaph:
“Making cuts has been kind of like a Jenga game,” Mr. Chabola said. “All we are doing is taking a piece out to find out if the tower falls. Then we take another piece and find out if the tower falls.
“What we need is an organizational chart so we know what the pieces do in order to keep the tower from falling.”
