Cuts list: CUSD prepares for the worst

Chico Unified School District administrators have come up with a list of $6 million in potential cuts that the Board of Trustees was to see at its Jan. 21 meeting.

Listed by the dollar amount that would be saved, rather than priority order, the 23 ideas range from eliminating counselors—at a $1 million savings—to reducing district office custodial staff, saving $21,675.

“It’s intended to give people an example of what the possibilities are,” Superintendent Scott Brown said. “The board as presently constituted is interested in seeing all the options.”

He said the CUSD is not crying wolf, just thinking ahead. If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fails in his attempt to pass a $15 billion bond, and if the state Legislature balks at raising taxes or cutting spending in other areas, Chico schools will see a $1,850,000 million hit this year, plus another $2,100,000 in 2005-06.

“Our target is $4 million [in cuts],” Brown said.

Brown added that this list is different from one he will prepare sometime in February: his own recommendations to the school board for $1.8 million-plus in cuts. For example, he said, “I am not prepared to recommend that a school close for the 2004-05 school year.”

Some of the cuts are ironic: The $444,000 that would be saved in eliminated air-conditioning stands in sharp contrast to the mid-1990s, when the CUSD followed through on a goal to get air-conditioning in every classroom. Also on the table is eliminating year-round education, the so-called “blue track” at the schools that have it, saving $79,550. And if the district closes Forest Ranch, it will be closing a campus that was built little more than a decade ago.

Brown mentioned that the board also may choose to redirect money it has been saving for other things, such as the $300,000 banked to implement its Strategic Plan.

Brown pointed out that the list includes some cuts that were considered a few years ago but discarded as unnecessary or too harsh. But times have changed. “Five years ago we had six librarians. Now we have two,” he said. There used to be full-time principals at Forest Ranch and Cohasset and assistant principals at elementary schools in town. Now, only high schools have “APs.”

The rest of the $6,051,702 in “potential savings” includes: dropping junior highs to five-period days ($695,000); eliminating the district contribution to athletics, mainly in the form of coaching stipends ($460,000); eliminating health aides ($381,000); halving employees’ travel expenses ($350,000); raising the fees to use CUSD facilities ($268,000); reducing contracted services by 10 percent ($250,000), further reducing nurses, psychologists and librarians ($200,000); reducing high-school assistant principals ($195,984); shifting costs, such as requiring the Associated Students and student clubs to pay for accounting services ($164,944); reducing custodians ($161,148); reducing technology support ($100,034); eliminating stipends for high-school activities directors ($97,186); eliminating stipends for high-school department chairs ($69,686); reducing high-school clerks ($62,824); charging student bodies for electricity used for fund-raising vending machines ($59,500) and reducing District Office clerical staff ($38,550).

The law requires that if a school district is possibly going to lay off teachers, it must send out notices to that effect by March 1. Classified staff members (clerks, bus drivers and so on) must be noticed by May 1.

The CUSD must pass its budget by June 30—likely long before the state has made its final decision.