Past solutions to the budget crisis

After years of unbalanced budgets coupled with an economic recession, the State of California finds itself with a staggering $27 billion deficit. Naturally, this has led to a significant decrease of funding for schools. These budget cuts have brought major changes into the Los Gatos-Saratoga school district.

For the 2010-11 school year, the district had to decrease its budget by $3 million. To meet the guidelines, the district negotiated salary freezes and reduction, reduced spending on school programs and dipped into the budget reserves.

Though downsizes were made to programs and staffing, the District Board held at utmost importance the preservation of the services directly impacting students. Therefore, cuts were directed at the programs that were far away from the classroom environment.

However, some staff cuts have affected the classroom sizes of English 9 and Algebra 1. What once was a very low student to teacher ratio has now become a ratio of 25 students for every one teacher.

The district also negotiated a salary step freeze with teachers to help control costs. Normally, after the completion of one year of teaching, teacher’s advance one “step” in salary.

But for the 2010-2011 year the step advancement has been stopped, resulting in the reduction of spending, but also has caused the teachers to have their a salary frozen for this year. In addition, the school’s administration took a 3 percent pay cut. The salary negotiations were only for one year and next year’s step advancements for teachers will continue.

The district made what many people thought were prudent decisions last year to compensate for the decrease in state funding. By drawing on funds from a variety of sources to fill the deficit, the district was able to minimize direct cuts to the classroom. But, as the state’s deficit situation continues to worsen, the district will now have to consider cuts both broader and deeper as all remaining fat is trimmed from an already lean budget.