The pleas of 23 impassioned speakers and the presence of 200 resistors to unavoidable cuts in the School District’s budget notwithstanding, the School Board last night scrutinized a roster of 53 recommendations for change-of-status and approved all but 8 of them.
Preserving even that relatively small number of positions or courses was regarded as a victory by some parents close to the schools.
Here are the 8 recommendations that escaped the axe, at least temporarily:
• Maintenance foreman.a
• High school assistant principal.
• Counselors.
• Guidance technician.
• Middle School average class size ratio set at 35:1 from 31:1.
• High school average class size ratio set at 35:1 from 31:1.
• Instructional assistant I (Title I, SIP).
• Instructional assistant III (Bilingual, EIA).
School Board watchdog Alan Elmont, of the Community Budget Advisory Committee, commended Board members for taking a surgical approach to a list of subtractions that was pretty much a fait accompli, a task with almost no options.
“Going through the recommendations by the District line-by-line, the Board made every effort to retain teachers, instructional aides, people close to the classroom,” Mr. Elmont said.
Zeidman, Gourley Step Out
Once again second-year Board members Scott Zeidman and Steve Gourley were the most aggressive, most skeptical inquisitors of the persons in the District office — starting with Supt. Dr. Myrna Rivera Cote — who drew up the recommendations.
Against a background dominated by the unmistakably anti-management mood of the large crowd at Lin Howe School for the 4-hour meeting, Mr. Zeidman and Mr. Gourley pressed for richer, detailed explanations than a bare several-word position title.
Board members also insisted that administrators justify and further describe their plans for restructuring the District’s apparatus once the recommended changes have been implemented.
Some activists said the Board’s choices, by law, were so restricted that it was like driving circularly in a cul-de-sac.
The five members of the School Board were confronted with the directive to authorize close to $4 million in subtractions in quest of balancing the District budget by the weekend, the state-ordered deadline for budget filings.
Mr. Zeidman confessed this morning that he felt “awful so many people lost their jobs, especially in this economic environment.
“However, it didn’t seem to me that we had any other choice. We made cuts that will have the least impact on the children, that will do the least damage.”
The mood of the somber evening was lifted briefly during the opening hour when Dr. Cote announced formation of a fundraising campaign by the Culver City Education Foundation to ease the School District’s shortfall — enhanced by her own donation.
Will It Make a Difference?
Called “Empower Our Schools,” she said that all campaign funds will be channeled “directly to the schools to supplement the cuts in School Improvement funding. School Improvement funds, as you know, were cut 35 percent over this year and next by the state. ‘School Improvement’ funds everything from field trips to extra programs to instructional aides in our District.
“Expenditures from these funds will be decided by each school.
“It is our hope that we can raise enough money to make a difference for our students at this difficult time.”
With that, Dr. Cote declared that she will donate 1 percent of her annual salary, about $1800, to the campaign. She said she has asked the other three dozen members of the Irving Place management team to do the same.
Culver City High School Principal Pam Magee, speaking on behalf of the management group known by the acronym MACCS — representing managers, directors, counselors, confidential secretaries and administrators — seconded the superintendent’s sentiments.
“MACCS members strongly believe no one group or person is more important than another,” Ms. Magee said. “All are significant, and each person plays a vital role.
“The management team would like to take the lead in proposing a voluntary donation of 1 percent of our base salaries to go toward” the Ed Foundation campaign.”
It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for the first note of apparent dissent to emerge.
Doesn’t Sound Unanimous
Said Barbara Brown, principal of Farragut School:
“Today I was made aware of an email asking for administrators and management alone to take a pay cut in order to demonstrate that we are, indeed, leaders.
“So I ask you, what does a cut in salary have to do with one’s ability to lead?
“For the past year, we have all listened to the cries of Americans like ourselves who are in a similar fiscal crisis, calling out for leadership. At the polls this past November, they made their voices heard and got leadership. However, not then, nor now, has anyone asked the leader of our nation to take a pay cut because a pay cut has little to do with leadership.”
Ms. Brown, however, closed with a message of unity. “We all need to do our part,” she said.
