California weighs cutting school staff and pay

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposals to shorten the school year and increase class sizes will force California teacher unions to make the same tough decisions that other employee groups have faced recently:
Cut salaries to maintain workers' jobs, or maintain salaries and lose workers.
That's because shortening the school year would amount to a furlough for teachers -- having them take days off without pay. And increasing class size means laying teachers off.
With the failure of the May 19 ballot initiatives, the Republican governor has proposed slashing $4.7 billion from education spending over the next 13 months. He says federal stimulus money will reimburse schools for most of the cuts, but many districts had planned to use that money to fill gaps left from the budget Schwarzenegger signed in September.
In the current budget round, it's unlikely the Legislature will approve the cuts exactly as Schwarzenegger has proposed. Still, there is widespread consensus that schools are going to get pinched -- a lot.
K-12 education makes up nearly 40 percent of the state budget, so it's virtually impossible for lawmakers to solve the $21 billion deficit without affecting schools. That really means affecting the people who work in them, because salaries make up 80 percent to 90 percent of most district budgets.
Decisions on school staffing are made locally, the product of negotiations between each of the state's roughly 1,000 school districts and their local teachers unions.
"You can anticipate that some will say 'let's have a shorter school year and smaller class sizes,' and others will opt for larger class sizes and more instructional time," said Rachel Ehlers, who specializes in education at the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.
The choice between pay cuts and job losses has become common in this recession. As public budgets shrink, cops, firefighters, and other local government employees are facing the same options. With the devastated stock market, unions in the private sector are confronting them, too.
Putting the choice to teachers has a unique ripple effect on California's parents and students. Knock a week off the school calendar, and many parents will have to pay someone to look after their kids. Lay teachers off, and more children will crowd into each classroom.
It's not simply an either-or. Many districts and unions will likely negotiate some combination of pay cuts and layoffs. Sacramento City Unified and its unions, for example, are discussing two furlough days, a 1 percent salary reduction and laying off nurses, counselors, librarians, psychologists and music teachers.
In Sacramento County, Natomas Unified and its unions are looking at approximately 60 teacher layoffs, a 3 percent salary cut and up to five furlough days.
Right now, state law requires a school year of at least 180 days. Schwarzenegger's proposal calls for temporarily changing the law to allow districts to cut the school year to 173 days for the next three years. Each district and its union would decide whether to shorten the year.
"It's just to give them an option, it's not that we want to reduce instructional time," said Kathryn Gaither, the governor's undersecretary of education.
Some people worry that allowing a thousand different districts to decide whether to shorten the year could result in inequities across the state.

(E-mail Laurel Rosenhall at lrosenhall(at)sacbee.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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