By Kathleen Acuff

Los Altos School District trustees may close a deal with a new superintendent by the end of the month.

“We’ve identified a prospect, formulated an offer and started the background check. We still hope for closure in the next 10 days and hope to make an announcement at the board meeting on May 2,” Victor Reid III said last Friday afternoon.

The new superintendent will walk into the state’s top elementary district, in which the children of ambitious parents learn from teachers who are highly qualified in both the professional and the legal (No Child Left Behind) sense, and in which administration and teachers are accustomed to working together harmoniously. For all its advantages, however, it is a district that despite its location in an unusually affluent area is enduring many of the same financial woes as economically poor districts in California.

The district is consulting with its 17-member Citizens Advisory Committee for Finance to come up with a plan to cut expenses and raise revenues to make up the $1.4 million shortfall in the 2005-2006 budget and restore reserve funds, hovering around 2.5 percent, to the state-mandated 3 percent. On top of that, another $200,000 must be saved to keep the budget on track for the six-year projection period. Because $350,000 is all the district expects to gain from renting its unused space, the focus is on cuts.

The finance committee and district staff agree that budget cuts must be “structural” to get the job done. The amount of funds devoted to health benefits and compensation makes those items the likeliest to face reduction. The district saved $1.1 million last year by contracting with a less expensive health benefits provider. The total cost of benefits this year is $3 million. The finance committee believes that amount could be reduced by one-third if the district covers only employees and not their families. The possibility has not yet been brought before trustees for a decision.

Compensation for all employees is 80 percent of the district’s total budget. Because teachers draw 56 percent of the total, the district is seriously considering revising and capping the “step and column” plan that calculates their initial salary and subsequent raises. Negotiations with the Los Altos Teachers Association and other collective bargaining groups have been going on for months.

As veteran district adviser Dick Hasenpflug said in a finance committee meeting in March, “Some districts in the Valley are making salary cuts. LASD is looking at a salary freeze.”

In the March 9 meeting, committee members agreed that a fixed total salary cap on the step and column plan would result in $1.2 million in structural cuts. They are likely to recommend that the district pursue that plan until the budget is stabilized.

Teachers are naturally unhappy at the prospect of wages that don’t keep up with the rising cost of living in this area. Some say they will have to leave the district.

“A teacher can’t afford to live here and have a baby,” one local teacher commented.

The district should not look for further substantial help from the community, said Mark Goines, committee member and head of the Los Altos Educational Foundation. Parents’ contributions to the district’s budget through the educational foundation doubled in the past six years from $600,000 to $1.2 million. Parents are now telling Goines that they “don’t want to fill in the holes - they want to pay for enrichment programs.”

The finance committee will soon present a plan by which the district could operate as revenue limit for the next three years, gaining rather than losing income by accepting out-of-district students. The district has steadily and deliberately decreased interdistrict transfers for the past several years as it approached, then moved into and out of basic aid status last fall. It is now about $40,000 shy of the mark.

A sizable part of the budgetary problem, staff and finance committee members agree, is that the district is for all practical purposes operating the seventh elementary school it could not afford when it closed it two years ago. Bullis-Purissima Elementary School may be gone, at least temporarily, but some of its expense lives on in the budgetary impact made by Bullis Charter School, the district says.

Hasenpflug said recently that the finance committee and district staff incorrectly figured the fiscal impact of the charter school last year by not including the school’s total enrollment in its calculations.

“The total charter school enrollment, including interdistrict transfers, count against the basic aid,” he said.

Special programs expand

The district may expand the preschool autistic program now at Bullis and add a special education class at the school. The number of autistic students in the district is growing at an annual rate of 13 percent, staff said.

Special education “fits the structural criterion,” finance committee chairwoman Robin Abrams said. This budgetary item is being increased by the cost-of-living adjustment rate.