AIn advance of tonight’s first School Board meeting of the calendar year, the feared prospect of potential layoffs circulated through School District headquarters on Irving Place this afternoon.
All day, Ali Delawalla, the assistant superintendent for business services, has been poring over stark belt-cinching directions and numbers streaming in from Gov. Brown’s budget headquarters in Sacramento.
In recent years, Culver City teachers have made an almost clean escape when layoffs loomed — but that grace period may be ending. Clarity, however, remains remote at this early date. “I don’t want to say for sure,” said Interim Supt. Patty Jaffe, “but there probably will be layoffs.
“We are not in a maybe-maybe not situation,” she said this morning. “There are a lot of what-ifs in the budget, and a lot depends on what actually goes on the ballot. But it definitely is going to have an impact on us.”
The worst news will not be immediate for kindergarten-through-12 schools in California, but rather in six months when it will be known what proposals will go to the voters and how the electorate will respond.
“It could all fall out in June,” Ms. Jaffe said. “This is what we are trying to decipher right now.
“We are concerned about the state of redevelopment money. Then there is the matter of mental health and not funding AB 3632 (mental health services for special education students). One day we were told it was not going to be funded, and now we are told (the governor) is looking for a way to fund it.”
Ms. Jaffe indicated Mr. Delawalla would have a fuller report prepared for this evening’s Board meeting, but the cloud of major uncertainty is not likely to vanish.
A significant but so far unquantifiable amount of budgetary projection is conditional, hinging partially on the governor’s plan to go to the voters in June to seek a five-year extension on certain revenue streams.
