As the San Diego Unified School District faces a deficit of up to $100 million for the upcoming school year, the community has a chance to provide input on the budget process. One of the district\u2019s four remaining town hall meetings will be held Dec. 9 at Mission Bay High School. “It\u2019s going to outline the proposed cuts coming down from Sacramento, what cuts were made in the prior year and detail the proposed cuts in 2010,” said Pat Hom, president of Friends of Pacific Beach Secondary Schools, a nonprofit organization that supports area schools. As a result of the district\u2019s ballooning deficit since cuts were first considered in June, district spokesman Jack Brandais said everything is on the table. Money-saving ideas mentioned in June included class size increases, mandatory districtwide four-day furloughs, reductions in salaries and a number of staff positions being eliminated. With all those things under consideration, the budget situation is dire. “The budget discussions are simply that \u2013 discussions,” Hom said. “They won\u2019t know until September when the final cuts come in. Right now we need to make a game plan for the worst-case scenario as parents and teachers and students. It\u2019s a matter of being prepared.” District board of education representative John de Beck considers the idea of solving the budget issue by choosing a number of small programs to be cut as a form of cannibalism. He wants to come up with a larger-scale solution to fight the budget problem. “Let them say something big instead of talking about which little thing we\u2019re going to whittle away at,” de Beck said. “We need to propose something that makes everybody bear the burden.” De Beck\u2019s solution to solve the district\u2019s budget crisis is furloughs throughout the school year. He said these periodic days off would save the district approximately $6 million per day. “I want to leave everything alone and just cut the days,” de Beck said. “That won\u2019t mean any layoffs and that won\u2019t mean we lose any talent.” Friends of Pacific Beach Secondary Schools wants the cuts to stay away from school programs such as sports and music, Hom said. The organization\u2019s hope is that the cuts have a minimal impact on students. “They need to keep the budget cuts as far away from the students as possible, and that includes everything that students do,” Hom said. Each of the four remaining town hall budget meetings will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The other meetings are tonight, Dec. 3 at San Diego High, Dec. 8 at Madison High and Dec. 14 at Porter Elementary North. “They need to get involved now because what they plan to do they need to know in advance,” Hom said. “All these things are things that have to be negotiated.” For more information on the meetings, visit www.-sandi.-net\/budget.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the San Diego Unified School District faces a deficit of up to $100 million for the upcoming school year, the community has a chance to provide input on the budget process. One of the district\u2019s four remaining town hall meetings will be held Dec. 9 at Mission Bay High School. “It\u2019s going to outline […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"School budget deficit looms: Public invited to Dec. 9 district budget meeting","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551,11593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news","category-no-images"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}