Teachers are calling the painful cuts made by the Los Angeles Board of Education last week the Tuesday Night Massacre. To many, they are a tragic replay of a budget meltdown that scalded the schools 10 years ago.
During that crisis, the board leaned on teachers to make up the deficit by taking a 10% pay cut. Now, having fought for a decade to restore their pay and then add a few percentage points, the teachers view increased class sizes and reduced health benefits as merely a more devious way of saving money, and they are in a finger-pointing mood. They blame the district's old bugaboos of bureaucracy, inefficiency and heedless spending for the estimated $400-million gap in the proposed $5.2-billion general fund budget.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday May 7, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 2 inches; 46 words Type of Material: Correction
Tustin Unified-A story in the California section Saturday about school finance mischaracterized a $56-million budget cut in the Tustin Unified School District as deficit reduction. The district postponed two school construction projects because of a delay in receiving state bond money, not a shortage of operating funds.
No one, including officials in charge of the 735,000-student district, would deny that many of its troubles are self-inflicted. But school finance experts around the state insist that the root of the problem is a state funding mechanism that causes school dollars to yo-yo with the state budget and the overall economy.
"What L.A. is facing is a microcosm of what all districts are or will be facing as we go through this budget process," said Brett McFadden, finance specialist with the Assn. of California School Administrators in Sacramento. "I don't think the average voter realizes that in a week and a half we'll have final data that will indicate we're going to have the worst state budget crisis in ... history."
Dozens of other large and mid-sized districts are already making similar cuts, including teacher layoffs and class-size increases. Budget deficits being reported around the state include $3 million by Burbank Unified School District, $5.4 million by Berkeley Unified, $8 million by Monterey Peninsula Unified, $10 million by Moreno Valley Unified and $56 million by Tustin Unified, according to reports gathered by the state's Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team.
Although the amounts are much larger in Los Angeles because of its size and demographic makeup, some other districts are proposing cutbacks that are arguably more severe. At least five, for example, are considering raising the 20-student class size in kindergarten through third grade, a state reform initiated during the boom of the 1990s. Los Angeles' class sizes may increase, but only in the older grades, officials say.
