At the Tamalpais Union High School District board meeting on May 11, staff, students, parents, and community members from across the district gathered at Redwood High School to vocally oppose the elimination of 14 positions and potentially 28 members of the district’s classified staff.The Tamalpais Union High School District’s board meeting on May 11 was unusually packed and tense. Staff, students, parents, and community members from across the district gathered at Redwood High School to vocally oppose the elimination of 14 of the district’s classified staff positions. Many people spoke to the board, pleading for them to rethink their votes and find alternative ways to meet the required budget cuts for the 2010-2011 school year. Applause, hissing, and shouted comments reached a crescendo after the board unanimously passed the resolution and the majority of the audience filed out of the conference center in disgust.
“This is the saddest day that ever was,” Britt Block, Tamalpais Federation of Teachers (TFT) Union President and Redwood drama teacher, told the Board of Trustees as she choked back tears.
“What you are teaching us about community is despicable,” Redwood High School senior Mitchell Davidovitz said, initiating a round of applause.
Before passing Resolution 20 to reduce classified services for the 2010-2011 school year, the board allowed the student representatives from Tam, Drake, Redwood, Tamiscal and San Andreas to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down advisory vote on the resolution. The students unanimously showed the board members thumbs-down, once again evoking applause from the audience behind them.
Pursuant to Resolution 20, 19.638 full-time equivalent positions of the classified staff, which includes clerks, secretaries, and library specialists, were eliminated. The resolution cut $1 million of costs out of the district’s goal to reduce the $55 million budget by $2.7 million. In addition, the entire staff of the school district has lost at least two paid days, many part-time teachers have been asked return full time or resign, certain positions have been combined, and the core literacy portfolio graduation requirement has been postponed.
The cuts are an attempt to create a balanced budget for the 2010-2011 school year in the face of a looming deficit. The district published a Finance and Facilities FAQ on the district website in which they outlined three reasons for the budget deficit: a .25 percent decrease in revenues from local property tax, a reduction in categorical and adult education basic aid funding from the state, and increases in operating expenditures like salaries, benefits, and utilities. According to the May 2010 staff budget update, the district faces a combined $6,972,198 deficit from the 2009-2010, 2010-2011, and 2011-2012 school years.
Tam’s receptionist Allison Krivoruchko, service center specialist Barbara Rousseau, registrar Joanie Ross, counseling clerk Suzanne Ledbetter, assistant principal’s secretary and athletic clerk Jackie Hamilton, and district nurse Cheri Sandberg will not return to the school next year because Resolution 20 effectively eliminated their positions.
Many district employees have responded to the board’s decision to eliminate 28 members of the classified staff with a mixture of confusion, anger, remorse, and frustration.
“I think a lot of people felt there wasn’t as great an effort to find other places to cut,” Perrey said.
An idea list submitted by a teacher offered four suggestions, including cutting staff at the district level before classified employees, scrapping the newly-proposed Teacher Leadership Program, and spending $1 million of the $17 million budget reserve, which could save, according to the teacher, 24 classified jobs.
The new Teacher Leadership Program combines the Department Chairs with teacher mentors for new teachers and provides one teacher leader straightforward access to the district administrators. The board reported on May 11 that the Teacher Leadership Program wouldn’t cost extra money by combining positions even though those promoted to Teacher Leadership positions would receive a pay raise and would cost the district about $30,000 per teacher leader.
In addition, the school district eliminated the director for the Core Literacy Portfolio program, a staple graduation requirement assigned sophomore year that assesses a student’s ability to read and write, so the program will be suspended until the 2011-2012 school year, when administrators hope it will be ready to run online. Tam assistant principal Corbett Elsen said the program is on hold for a year to improve it and save the costs associated with running the program, roughly $90,000 per year.
The board rejected suggestions to spend some of the budget reserve because they wished to hold onto their reserves in case the district loses funding from the state altogether. Although the state of California requires that school districts only keep 2 percent of their budget for reserves, the office of superintendent Laurie Kimbrel published in the May 2010 staff budget update that they need 27 percent of the budget as a “safety net” in case the state discontinues funding the district. “If basic aid were to be eliminated or changed, our reserve would allow us to have one year to dismantle our programs and create a new reality for our students and community,” the budget update read.
According to a compilation of information from 2009-2010 budget documents assembled by Drake math teacher Michelle Lackney that compared 12 other basic aid districts’ reserves, the Tamalpais district exceeds the other districts’ reserves by at least 4.4 percent of the total annual budget. Most districts cited keep an average of 11.13 percent of their budget for reserves; the Tamalpais district keeps 27.8 percent of the budget as reserve funds.
CSEA Union President Bill Bridges compiled a list of budget reduction suggestions for the district in February, when the district began to solicit ideas from staff. According to Tam budget secretary Leslie Holt, the suggestions, which included more thorough textbook and equipment inventory, finding cheaper office supply vendors, reducing staff development days, and decreasing the use of paper and utilities, could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars saved for the district.
According to Holt, the Tam district started to take budget reduction measures as long as two years later than other districts in Marin. Holt’s husband, an employee of the San Rafael High School district, experienced efforts to save and cut money two years ago.
Kimbrel, who has been superintendent of the Tam district since August 2008, wrote in an email to the Tam News, “[W]e spent January through May gathering input, data, and having a series of discussions about how to proceed.” Many of the reduction ideas, Kimbrel and Walter said, were incorporated in the list of reductions approved by the board, but were not enough to balance the budget.
Until February, Holt said, “the money continued to flow” and the Tam district did not attempt to cut back expenditures. “They may have done some budgetary switcheroos, but none of that was brought to the attention of the employees,” Holt said. According to financial records, Tam High expenditures have grown every year since the 2007-2008 school year. That year, Tam spent $677,851 total, and the next year school expenditures totaled $869,640. The district allotted $1,022,244 for Tam’s 2009-2010 school year, and according to Holt, departments are “spending that money as hard as they can” because the departments will not be able to keep unspent money as carryover for the following year.
“I had a department chair want to spend money on a shredder—didn’t realize we had a shredding service. If I hadn’t questioned it, and they purchased it, that would have been $700 or $800 spent on a shredder we don’t need,” Holt said.
According to Elsen, Walter, and Parrish, the district eliminated some money from the budget last year. The board eliminated all discretionary spending and a consultant to do work for graduate study, increased class sizes, decided not to institute an International Baccalaureate program, and reduced per-pupil financial allocation and expenditures for technology and other supplies.
At the board meeting on May 11, Drake attendance clerk Millie Heim told the board members that they should have considered salary reductions before layoffs. “If you’d asked us all to take some little cut to save everybody’s jobs, we would have,” Heim said. Holt expressed similar sentiments.
“We’re just trying to stay as far away from the classroom as possible,” board member Cindy McCauley told the audience on May 11.
According to Tam English teacher Austin Bah, the district took into consideration teacher input for budget reduction ideas, but the final product was still a surprise. “Was there teacher input? Yes, but it seems like cuts to classified personnel seem to be higher than anyone could have anticipated,” Bah said.
As it stands, administrators have not developed a plan to make up for the personnel losses next year. Five out of 10 classified positions were eliminated at Tam.
It is still unclear what work will fall through the cracks in part because losses have not been finalized. Staff members who have lost their jobs because their positions were eliminated have the opportunity to “bump” other staff members out of their jobs if they have seniority and sufficient experience in the area.
Teacher morale has been adversely affected by the news of the elimination of classified positions, Bah said. Several teachers were willing to provide background information about the board’s decisions and their effects on campus, but few were willing to go on record. Many are nervous that next year, when the district will have to find ways to cut another $2 million from the budget, they could be next.
Personnel cuts would have been more drastic, Elsen, Drescher, and Walter agreed, if 12 teachers in the district had not retired. The district provided a $12,000 retirement incentive to certificated staff and another unspecified amount as a retirement incentive for classified staff. “The district proactively did something to incentivize people to retire, which minimizes the number of people we have to lay off because we can hire younger, newer teachers who have less income,” Elsen said.
Written by Elissa Stolman. This article originally appeared in the June 2010 issue.