FYI: "Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own."

–Logan Pearsall Smith

The real cost of school layoffs

San Luis Coastal’s budget shortfall means fewer adults will be watching over our kids

BY ANNE QUINN

San Luis Coastal Unified School District administrators find themselves in the position of a rich heiress who squandered her fortune and now needs to find a way to feed and care for her kids.

"We’re getting penalized for [the administrators’] mistakes, and it’s our future they’re dealing with," said CeeCee Johnson, one of hundreds of SLO High School students who walked out of class last week to protest a $3.3 million budget shortfall that will leave the district with fewer teachers, guidance counselors, nurses, instructional aides, and school custodians.

The cuts, everyone agrees, mean there will be fewer caring adults available for students at a time when violence at schools in California has shown us kids need more help, not less, in dealing with pressure.

Statistics show that San Luis Coastal has a rising occurrence of violence. Students themselves say that budget cuts will further limit their options for growth while leaving them feeling frustrated and abandoned. When that happens, the potential exists for kids to lash out, sometimes violently.

SLOHS student Joe Petroni said that the potential for school violence scares him a bit when he overhears someone on campus say, "I could kill so-and-so."

"We have to be really in touch with people like that; we can’t just ignore them," he said.

Most people agree that cuts in the district will mean more students will fail to get the attention and the counseling they need.

From riches to rags

The San Luis Coastal Unified School District was once so wealthy with property tax money from Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant that it didn’t even qualify for state funding on a per-student basis the way most schools do.

The district spent money on protracted lawsuits, leather-bound reports, laptop computers for teachers, many person-hours dedicated to writing curriculum that can be bought off the shelf, and a controversial supplemental reading program. Money even went to pay for such luxuries as cars for administrators.

"They were hemorrhaging money," said Sylvia Bolander Muscia, who served on the district’s board of trustees for four years. "Purchase orders for $1 million would come before the board, and when I asked what they were for, I was told, ‘Don’t micro-manage.’"

In the meantime the district's teachers were the lowest-paid in the county, according to San Luis Coastal Teacher Association chief negotiator and teacher Jeff Decker.

Many budget cuts have been blamed on the declining tax revenue from Diablo. But a look at recent budgets indicates that it is the district's increasing spending, not its decreasing revenue, that is the problem

Tax revenues from Diablo Canyon have indeed decreased, but general property tax revenues have increased, offsetting the district’s losses. Today, the district receives one-third of its property tax revenue–about $12 million–from Diablo Canyon. In the past, it received one-half of its property tax revenue, or $14.5 million, from Diablo, according to Rory Livingston, assistant superintendent, business. However, general property tax revenue has increased from $18.4 million in 1996-97 to $21.6 million this year, Livingston said.

The district has known for a long time that revenue from Diablo was going to decline. In 1993-94, when it learned that the plant was licensed to operate only until 2025, the district established an endowment fund of $7.3 million to offset the coming decline in revenues.

Andrew Carter, a parent and part-time lecturer at Cal Poly’s College of Business, has been keeping an eye on that fund. According to Carter, who has a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of Business, the district began nibbling away at the endowment fund in its very first year, when they helped themselves to $20,000. Each year the amount of money siphoned off the endowment fund increased until it peaked in 1998-99 at $2.2 million.

Livingston said that the money went to pay for instructional programs. "How could we have explained to parents that we were cutting programs five or six years ago when we had $7 million in the bank?" Livingston asked.

Now the fund, which was supposed to be kept for a rainy day, is dry, and costs are raining down on the school. People are pointing fingers at past and present administrators and board members, accusing them of fiscal mismanagement.

But one elementary school teacher, who like other teachers didn’t want to be identified for this story, gives the board a little latitude.

"Imagine people off the street suddenly being asked to manage the budget for General Motors," he said. That’s the equivalent of what school board members–many of whom didn't have a fiscal background–were asked to do. And they failed.

Now, facing a $3.3 million budget shortfall, the district is tightening its belt and the students are getting squeezed. The district sent layoff notices to 32 teachers, although it expects to hire many of them back, thanks mainly to attrition. Debbie Coleman, director of personnel services for the district, estimates that when everything balances out, 20 teachers will have left the district.

But some people question whether the cuts are being applied to the right place.

Critics like Carter believe that the district is still making bad fiscal decisions. Carter went on the Internet to compare San Luis Coastal School District with similar districts (Novato, Davis, and Los Alamitos) and found that San Luis Coastal has twice as many administrators even after the budget cuts.

Yet only two administrative positions are being eliminated by the budget cuts–one from personnel and one from the instructional media center.

Other critics are blaming the San Luis Coastal Teachers Association for bringing on the layoffs with its demand for higher pay. Decker says that assumption is wrong, that one has nothing to do with the other. "The district handed us the staffing numbers before July when the Diablo Canyon tax revenue decreased," he said.

Teachers who aren't laid off will receive a 2 percent raise for the 2000—01 school year. In 2001—02, teachers with 5 years or less experience will get a 5 percent pay raise, and teachers with 5 years experience or more will receive a 12 percent increase. Even after those raises, San Luis Coastal teachers will rank seventh in pay among SLO County’s school districts, according to Decker.

Kids in need

On March 20, hundreds of SLO High School students gathered on the athletic field in exuberant, peaceful protest against the budget cuts. No parents were there. No administrators stood in the bleachers to hear them. Although the protest was on their behalf, the teachers stayed in their classrooms. The principal manned the gate. One police car lazily circled the campus, made a U-turn, and left.

Ironically, just one week earlier Atascadero police held a school-shooting training exercise. Dressed in full combat uniforms with helmets, weapons at the ready, they broke into Atascadero High School, isolated an imaginary perpetrator, and practiced stabilizing a terrorizing situation. The impetus for the Atascadero police drill was the recent shooting in Santee, officer Brian Dana said.

The 1999—2000 Safe Schools Assessment, commissioned by the state of California, shows there were no incidents of assault with a deadly weapon in Atascadero Unified School District. However, the occurrences of students possessing deadly weapons at school increased slightly, from three to five.

By contrast, in the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, three assaults with a deadly weapon occurred last year; none had occurred the year before. But instances of students in possession of a deadly weapon doubled, from seven incidents to 14.

One reason for the sharp increase in such potentially violent instances may be found in the counseling budget. At San Luis Coastal, the counseling budget represents less than 2 percent of the overall general operating budget of more than $53 million, according to Cathy Hunter, director of fiscal services for the district.

"School violence comes from ignorance on behalf of school staff, denial, and poor upbringing," speculated SLOHS junior Joe Petroni.

Counselor Gregory Bettencourt fights that sort of ignorance every day. He assists, listens, and occasionally saves kids. Lots of kids. One of only four counselors for 1,565 high school students, Bettencourt is responsible for helping 420 kids achieve their dreams for college or careers. He also deals with conflicts in their schedules and their social lives, conflicts in their families, and conflicts in their heads. Next year, when his department gets cut by half a person, he will be responsible for 550 students.

That translates into less time for counselors to see kids and makes it impossible for the counselors to meet the students’ needs.

Most students get to know their guidance counselors, if at all, only when they encounter scheduling problems. At the beginning of this school year, Morro Bay High School sophomore Brandon Butcher had trouble getting in to see his counselor to straighten out his schedule.

"He was trying to get an appointment for four days," said his mother, Peggy Flora. "Finally I called and said, ‘We have to straighten this out.’ When we got there, there was a huge line."

California has the worst ratio of guidance counselors to students in the country: 1-to-979. "California has no mandate for guidance counselors. That’s one of the reasons California is worst in the nation. We’re 51st, behind all 50 states and even Washington, D.C.," said Paul Meyers, consultant in student support program services for the California Department of Education.

The national counselor-student ratio averages 1-to-561, which SLOHS barely exceeds. "In the best states the ratio is 250 [students] to one [counselor]," Meyers said.

After budget cuts are implemented the counselor-student ratio in the district’s middle schools will get worse. For example, Laguna Middle School counselor Julie Jones is responsible for 420 students now; next year she’ll be responsible for 620. At Los Osos Middle School the ratio is 1-to-360; next year it will be 1-to-420.

Middle school students are less concerned with getting into college than they are with fitting in and often have "personal, family types of troubles," according to Jones, who has been a counselor at Laguna Middle School for nine years. Personal problems sometimes show up in minor discipline infractions, like throwing spit balls, or lead to poor academic performance.

Such problems "are all part of the whole child. If a child is not doing well in school it’s often due to problems at home. The great role of a counselor is to bring all the pieces together," Jones said. "Essentially what we are doing is being advocates for kids."

The parents of middle school children "start to back off a little more because the kids want them around less," said Susan Johnson, intervention and prevention coordinator for the Los Osos and Laguna middle schools. Her services, which are paid for by a federal grant, are immune to budget cuts. "Yet even though the kids are saying ‘stay away,’ they really need more adult supervision because they are starting to make challenging decisions and there is more peer pressure."

In doing a middle schools needs assessment, Johnson discovered a huge vacuum in the majority of middle-school-aged children’s lives: the lack of male role models. She organized a "dads’ night," with the word "dad" in parentheses, she said, to mean any male role model. The event drew 90 men, and Johnson said it was the most highly attended after-school event of the year.

If many students can't get in to see their counselors for days, even fewer of them have ever even seen a school nurse. The district employs three nurses for 8,572 students. The only time sophomore Brandon Butcher remembers a nurse on campus was when a student suddenly died of heart failure. "When [he] died, a real nurse came in and talked to us," he said. "I don’t think she’s still around." Office personnel are trained in first aid, and emergencies are handled with a call to 911.

SLOHS senior Jessica Mintz remembers going into the office and asking if she could lie down. "The lady said they had no place for me to lie down and called my parents instead. I had to go home," she said. "Lying down would have made me feel better."

Less money equals fewer choices

Over and beyond the reduction of counselors and nurses, what really has the students up in arms, what caused them to protest, are the loss of teachers and schedule changes that the budget cuts cause.

Butcher said he planned his entire high school career on the block system, which is now being abandoned; teachers voted recently to change back to a semester system. In his freshman and sophomore years, he purposely took a heavy class load of four classes daily, each one and a half hours long, so that he could accumulate enough credits in his first two years to allow him to have half-day schedules his last two years. That would give afternoons off to concentrate on his senior project, he said.

Now that block scheduling has been eliminated, Butcher faces two options. He can take a minimum of six 45-minute classes, which causes him to run from subject to subject without ever having "enough time to get into anything," or he can take two-and-a-half-hour classes, which would mean he’d have to spend five hours in two classes before lunch. Either way, under the new schedule he’ll have to extend his day into midafternoon to get the same number of credits the block system would have let him accumulate in morning-only classes.

SLOHS seniors have been on a different system, the trimester system. They object to returning to a semester system because they say it eliminates electives and second chances. Lauro Adrian Garcia, one of the organizers of the recent protest, explained it this way: "Currently there are 70 teachers each teaching 11 classes. That’s 770 classes a year, with a teacher-student ratio of 1-to-33. Next year, if they go on a semester system, we will lose eight teachers and have a six-period day. That means 62 teachers will teach 10 classes a year. That means we are losing 150 classes," he said.

His friend Marcus Afzali, also a student at SLOHS, said that the current trimester system gives students "more chances" than the proposed semester system. "If you fail a class during the semester you can only take it at night or in summer school. If you fail [under] the trimester system, you have a chance to make it up during the school year," he said.

The classes students are losing are electives, their favorites. Petroni said that art classes at SLOHS are being cut 45 percent.

"They expect English and math to satisfy everyone," said senior Erica Jensen, editor of Expressions, the school newspaper.

Many of the teachers leaving are also student favorites. "They cut back the good teachers–‘last hired, first fired,’" said MBHS freshman Andrea Steinmann.

Ironically, the trimester system caused a huge controversy when it was introduced in 1985. Parents and students flooded district board meetings to protest. The reason the trimester system was instituted was that the district board changed the high school graduation requirements from 218 credits, the state average required by the university system, to a whopping 270.

In a February radio interview on Muscia’s radio show, "Common Sense," board member Caroline Botwin explained, "We thought all the kids were going to Harvard. We wanted them all to be above average and good-lookin’."

Initially the teachers refused to teach six periods, as the trimester required, when teachers in similar districts were only teaching five for the same pay. Finally, according to Decker, the teachers’ union offered a compromise that paved the way for the trimester system.

Instead of taking the 14 percent pay raise over the next three years as they had negotiated, he said, they settled for a 7 percent raise on the condition that the district use the other 7 percent to hire more teachers. That made the current layoffs "predictable," according to Decker.

Every adult can make a difference

Kevin Patrick Sullivan, founder of the SLO Poetry Festival and a program of monthly poetry readings at Linnaea’s Cafe called Corners of the Mouth, is an employee in the SLOHS custodial department–a department being cut by 40 percent. This year, a student Sullivan said he barely knows, Daniel Kim, wrote this essay about him:

"I admire many people at San Luis High. The teachers and the administrators are so kind with their work, I cannot help but favor them all. However, there is one man who helps me see how to live life. His name is Kevin and he is a custodian. To many he is just known as ‘Kevin the Custodian,’ but to me I see him as a respectable figure. Kevin does not even know me, but I know him, just by seeing him in the halls or out on the grass cleaning up and serving his duty.

"It is amazing how much actions speak compared to words. I have never even talked with him in depth, but I know he is a very sincere and earnest person by his joyful expression and persistence at his job. Although Kevin is no big famous figure and just makes his living working in this small area of San Luis Obispo, he takes pride in his work and serves his duty with a passion. I think that is something that deserves much respect and adoration."

The essay proves that an adult doesn't have to be a teacher or a counselor to have an impact on a child. Every caring adult counts.

However, one result of the budget cuts is that there will be that many fewer eyes and ears and hearts on campus watching, listening, and caring for San Luis Coastal students. Æ

New Times reporter Anne Quinn can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].