More than 70 teachers and parents packed the Hollister School
District Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday night, many protesting
the district’s decision to lay off of vice principals at its six
elementary schools to balance a a more than $2 million budget
deficit.
Hollister – More than 70 teachers and parents packed the Hollister School District Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday night, many protesting the district’s decision to lay off of vice principals at its six elementary schools to balance a a more than $2 million budget deficit.
“Our vice principals are invaluable,” Beth McDuffy, a second-grade teacher at Sunnyslope School, told the board. “I can’t imagine a school running without them.”
All of the district’s elementary school vice principals received lay-off notices May 15. The district’s two middle schools, Rancho San Justo and Marguerite Maze, will retain the two vice principals at each school. The district will cover the cost of one vice principal at each school and the individual schools will pay for the other two, according to Bill Jordan, director of personnel at the district. The district had proposed cutting a vice principal position at each middle school.
The loss of vice principals – who handle everything from administrative duties to student discipline – could disrupt the smooth operation of schools in the district, parents and teachers fear, said Hollister Elementary School Teachers Association President Jan Grist.
“It’s impossible for one principal to do,” she said. “HESTA finds it appalling and absurd that the chief administrator would want to even speak about cutting vice principals at our district.”
The district also plans to hire 28 teachers after dismissing 37 teachers about two weeks ago. Most of the 28 vacancies were the result of the recent round of teacher lay offs, but some of the positions opened up because teachers are resigning after this year, Superintendent Judith Barranti said.
The district went ahead and laid off 37 teachers, knowing that many would need to be hired back, because state law mandates that teachers must be notified that they will be laid off by May 15, which is before the district knew how many vacancies it would need to fill, said Trustee Dee Brown, adding that the vacancies must now be filled so that class sizes do not exceed the new 35 students to one teacher ratio approved last May. Previously, class size ratios were 32 to 1.
Vice principals and teachers who were let go this month will have the opportunity to fill the 28 vacancies based on seniority, Barranti said.
During their meeting Tuesday, trustees unanimously approved the district’s positive interim report, which informs the state Department of Education that the district can pay its expenses for the next two years with money in reserve accounts. Recent teacher and administrator lay-offs have cut about $2 million from the budget, lowering the district’s projected budget shortfall for next year to about $165,000, according to the report.
Filing the report is good news for the district, which filed a qualified report in March, stating that it may not be able to pay its bills for the next two years.
But interim Chief Budget Officer Michael Slater told the board a structural imbalance remains between revenue and expenditures – primarily the high percentage of the expenses spent on employee salaries and benefits – that will put the district in similar financial straights in the coming years if it is not remedied. Though the recent round of lay-offs lowered the amount the district pays for employee salaries and benefits from 88 percent of the total budget to 85.5 percent for next year, automatic annual salary and benefit increases will push that number back up to 88 percent within two years, Slater said.
“The trend here is in the wrong direction, since the district cannot expect to achieve financial stability until salaries are brought down into the 80 percent range of the total budget,” Slater wrote in a May 16 memo to Barranti.
The district’s budget deficit is projected to grow to more than $660,000 in 2006-07 if the district does not resolve the imbalance between revenue and expenditures, depleting the district’s $2.1 million reserves within two years, Slater said.
“That’s unless the board does something to staunch the bleeding,” he said.
Also during Tuesday’s meeting, the board voted to approve the creation of a budget balancing plan for the next two years.
Hollister School District has been struggling to balance a $2 million budget deficit for next year. Declining enrollment, a high number of student absences, rising costs and less money from the state have crippled the district’s revenue, administrators have said. It has made cuts to fine arts programs and other expenditures – such as district-provided cell phones and, most recently, has laid off 37 teachers and six vice principals.
“The big ticket items causing this resurgence of deficit in spending are salaries and benefits,” Slater wrote in the memo to Barranti. “This means the district is not yet out of the financial woods.”
Luke Roney covers politics and agriculture for the Free Lance. Reach him at 831-637-5566 ext. 335 or at [email protected]
