By Sara Ballenger
The Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District was able to breathe a small sigh of relief last Wednesday, when Gov. Gray Davis withdrew plans to take away the state’s Basic Aid funding for schools.
A Basic Aid district receives a basic amount of general funding from the state, since the local property tax revenue within the district exceeds what could be provided under other state funding formulas.
Davis had suggested cutting $37 million from the state’s 60 Basic Aid districts. The state Senate and Assembly budget subcommittees both rejected the proposal.
If Basic Aid were eliminated and other proposed cuts made, the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District stood to lose approximately $12.5 million or one-third of its revenue, according to Superintendent Rich Fischer. Over 83 percent of the district’s total budget is spent on employee salaries, benefits and associated costs, Fischer added.
Once the district realized it could be devastated by these potential cuts, students, teachers, administrators and community members contacted the governor and local state legislators urging them to keep Basic Aid in place.
“We are very happy to have won the battle over the local property tax takeaway,” Fischer said. “It was a massive effort, which included countless hours of letter writing, e-mails and phone calls. It was truly heartening to see the impact a targeted grass-roots effort can make on our legislators and the governor.”
The Basic Aid victory is bittersweet. The district will still lose some Basic Aid funding and faces a $2.5 million cut, independent of the Basic Aid decision. The district’s board of trustees will adopt its budget by June 23.
“As we read the current budget, we will lose our $120 per pupil Basic Aid allocation, plus another $135 in across the board cuts and an additional amount of targeted cuts from various categorical programs,” Fischer said. “In our budget preparation process, we planned for a total of $370 per pupil in cuts and prepared a three-phase budget reduction plan. If the cuts are $370 per pupil, and our assumptions about increased enrollment of 200 students and property tax growth of 4.5 percent are accurate, we will only need to implement Phases I and II of our planned cuts.”
The district’s budget advisory committee gave Fischer a list of recommended cuts. Those items were divided into three levels of cuts.
The first level of cuts would be as follows: substitute teacher costs for $70,286; overtime compensation for $69,400; conference and travel time for $76,000; public relations for $20,000; postpone building the new Alta Vista High School for one year to capture developer fees to repay the general fund for $300,000; board costs for $15,000; telephone costs for $10,000; shifting all costs possible to grants for $200,000; eating disorder program bill back for $20,000; and reducing County Community School for $49,500.
The second round of cuts would be as follows: payoffs for vacation/compensation time for $55,000 or a 50 percent reduction; closing Opportunity High School for $150,000; coordinator of operations and transportation for $75,000, a 100 percent reduction; recovering all use fees for $30,000; swimming pools/off-season heat for $6,000; Curriculum Institute for $50,000, a 100 percent reduction; extracurricular transportation for $76,924, a 100 percent reduction; reduction of administrative costs equal to 0.5 Full-Time Equivalent administrator/confidential for $60,000; extra pay for extra duty (EPED) “undesignated” allocations open for $20,000; and per-pupil allocation to schools reduced by approximately $10 per pupil for $33,450, a 5 percent reduction. This level of cuts totals $556.374.
The next board meeting of the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District is scheduled 7 p.m., June 9, in the District Office Board Room, 1299 Bryant Ave., Mountain View. For more information, call the district office at 940-4650.
