The San Diego Unified School District Board of Education voted to cut about $63 million from the district\u2019s budget Tuesday by reorganizing central office departments, changing school programs, consolidating high schools with the fewest students and charging for student AP exams. The board also voted to approve “negotiable” items to be approved by unions. These affect workers\u2019 and teachers\u2019 pocketbooks with five-day furloughs, raising the cost of medical benefits and supporting a 6 percent across-the-board salary rollback. This most recent round of cuts also left approximately 230 full-time equivalent positions in limbo as the board worked to close a projected $79 million budget deficit for next school year. Board of Education President Richard Barrera said tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts from the state over the last two years have put the board in a difficult position. “This is our second round of going through [budget cuts]. It\u2019s very painful,” Barrera said after the Feb. 23 meeting. While the board tried to keep as much of the pain away from the classroom as possible, students stand to lose educational resources and programs. The Off-Campus Integrated Learning Experience (OCILE) program takes students to Old Town for a week to teach them about cultural and racial diversity and history. That program was reduced to two days a week. “In two days, what are we getting through?” asked Carlos Ramon, an educator with the OCILE program. “There\u2019s no opportunity to integrate and learn about each other.” The board also voted to make cuts in instructional materials, support services, the ordering of textbooks, technology and supplemental resources. Another difficult one was deciding to charge for the transportation of students, said board trustee John Lee Evans. Many students are bussed into beach community high schools. “Last year, we cut about $150 million out of our budget. We did that in large part without affecting the kids in our classrooms. There\u2019s just no way to do that anymore, no way to say, \u2018We\u2019re going to do things that do not have an effect on the students in the classrooms,\u2019” Evans said. The board shied away from other possibilities, such as closing elementary schools with the fewest students. The board still must finalize budget cuts. Trustees plan to approve a budget report to the County Board of Education Tuesday, March 9. The district must also balance it\u2019s approximately $2 billion budget by June. Barrera said state-level budget cuts are the culprit for district budget cuts, while urging parents, teachers and stakeholders to contact state representatives and Governor Schwarzenegger\u2019s office. The governor\u2019s office must revise the projected state budget in May, he said. “There are a lot of variables at work,” Barrera said. “So we gotta keep fighting to keep [cuts to education] out of the governor\u2019s May revise.” The board is scheduled to meet next on budget issues, Tuesday, March 9 at the Eugene Brucker Education Center, 4100 Normal St.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The San Diego Unified School District Board of Education voted to cut about $63 million from the district\u2019s budget Tuesday by reorganizing central office departments, changing school programs, consolidating high schools with the fewest students and charging for student AP exams. The board also voted to approve “negotiable” items to be approved by unions. These […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"School board tries to close budget gap","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[12360,11560,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-duplicate","category-la-jolla-village-news","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296913","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=296913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}