The San Luis Coastal Unified School District board waded through vocal opposition from students and parents and approved $5 million in budget cuts for the 2026-27 school year.
The 6-1 vote, with board member Robert Banfield dissenting, happened on Dec. 16, roughly a month after music students and their parents learned of the proposed $150,000 slash to the musical instrument budget.
“You don’t know how lucky you are to have teachers who love you, who share their talents of music with you,” Banfield told students gathered at the meeting. “I regret that I cannot support this way to balance the budget. I know what it is to have to make sacrifices on a very personal basis financially, and I know how important it is to run a fiscally responsible district. But there must be another way.”
San Luis Coastal has been grappling with tensions about its budget since the beginning of the year when parents and teachers convinced the school board to save school counselors from staff reductions and to retain the transitional kindergarten (TK) program.
The district is strapped for cash because of the end of pandemic-era funding, a state requirement to continue offering TK without any funding support for basic aid districts, escalating pension contributions, increased day-to-day costs, and the loss of unitary tax revenue from Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which once brought in $10 million a year for the school district.
New conflict arose in November when a group of parents, principals, teachers, and union representatives called the Fiscal Sustainability Committee brought forward a deficit-balancing proposal that many community members said wasn’t equitable—especially for the music and choir programs.
Compared to the athletics budget and summer stipends for coaches, the budget for the music program ranked lower in items to reinstate if district funding recovered. Discussions between SLO Instrumental Music Boosters Association (SLOIMBA) and district leadership helped bring down the proposed budget cut to $100,000.
Band and color guard students, their parents, and SLOIMBA members flooded the school board meeting. The district also received 66 letters about the impacts to the music program.
“When I went to middle school, I felt like I didn’t fit in with everyone else, and then I found band,” SLO High School senior Pluto Rios wrote. “For the first time in a while, I found a community of people just like me, and I fit in. In high school, I joined the color guard and found my people who like dancing and performing, but also hearing live, raw music.”
While most of the board was sympathetic to the budget cut impacts, they maintained that the district had to be brought out of the red while working with the affected groups to find other funding solutions.
But it was board member Marilyn Rodger’s comments that drew boos and accusations of being a liar from the people attending the meeting.
Rodger said she found it difficult to believe students who were complaining that broken instruments were held together by hair ties—something mentioned in many letters written to the district.
“It’s hard for me to conceive that a large group of students came to the same decision about verbiage,” Rodger said. “I think there was an effort to try to frighten kids into thinking we weren’t going to have band. … You feel that I’m disrespectful, pardon me? I’ve sat here for four hours and listened.”
She added that the board helped the music program in the past by approving $1 million roughly 10 years ago for instrument repair and replacement. Rodger claimed that money was instead used for other needs.
Superintendent Eric Prater also addressed the $1 million allocation at the meeting. But he said that the sum, though large, didn’t add up to much because instrument repair and replacement are expensive. Prater added that the district would work on improving “systems that are lacking” in the coming months.
SLOIMBA didn’t respond to New Times’ requests for comment before press time.
Supporters of the music program weren’t the only ones who spoke up about the budget cut.
Parents raised concerns about impacts to the English-learner programs and the to the Hispanic families who mostly benefit from them. A Los Osos Middle School counselor commented on the reduction of three secondary counselors from district middle and high schools as well as the elimination of the middle school curriculum for social emotional learning. Those removals amount to $385,000 in cuts.
Fourth-grader Brant Weiss drew attention to his librarian. The district will reduce the hours of all librarians at each elementary school as the result of a $190,000 reduction.
“Just like a classroom needs a special person to work the room and make it come to life, you need a special person to make a library work,” he said. “I want you to think about what a library is without a librarian: just books. Teachers can’t remember all the books’ whereabouts with so much on their plates.” ∆
This article appears in Dec 25, 2025 – Jan 1, 2026.
County Schools has a $36 million budget. How much of their budget is spent at the school level?