If the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is unable to pass a balanced budget by July 1 next year, the district could be considered financially insolvent, causing a state takeover of the district, said SDUSD officials. If that comes to pass, the school board would become an advisory body, Superintendent Bill Kowba would be out of a job and the state would bring in one administrator to make all the district’s decisions. “They bring in one person who will essentially say, ‘Close that school. Get rid of those programs. Increase class size,’ but without any thought to the impact,” said Scott Barnett, who represents beach-area schools in the district. At minimum, the district faces a $60 million deficit next fiscal year due, in part, to four consecutive years of state budget cuts to public education. Since 2007, SDUSD has been forced to cut $450 million from its budget and reduce staff by 15 percent. SDUSD, like many other districts in the state, “has used every budget trick in the bag to get through these difficult times,” said Kowba. “These cumulative reductions have been sweeping and devastating and are now being felt in all of our classrooms.” This school year, students started the year with 1,000 fewer teachers and staff members. To further pour salt in the wound, the state will trigger midyear cuts in December if the state’s revenue projections — optimistically presumed to be $4 billion — fall short by $2 billion or more. At the end of September, state revenue projections were already more than $700 million below its budget target. If the triggers are engaged, SDUSD’s deficit could skyrocket up to $118 million next year — a price tag Kowba said the district simply can’t afford. “Under that worst-case scenario, even with employee concessions and hundreds of teacher and support staff layoffs, a balanced budget will be very difficult to achieve, challenging the fiscal solvency of the district,” Kowba wrote in an opinion letter to the San Diego Union-Tribune on Oct. 13. In a meeting with the La Jolla Cluster Association on Oct. 19, Barnett named a few solutions to resolve the deficits in both scenarios — all of which, he said, range from “grim” to “terrible.” “District wide, we’re going to have to make these tough decisions. We need to think of everything just to keep the doors open next year — significant cuts to magnet and language schools to International Baccalaureate programs and pushing class sizes as high as we possibly legally can,” he said. “Every horrible thing you think of is going to have to be on the table if we want to avoid financial insolvency.” SDUSD board members are creating parallel budget tracks, discussing a range of options, including more classified and certified layoffs, school closures and realignments, property sales, tapping into already depleted reserves, program and transportation cuts, union concessions and reducing the school year by seven days. “We need to get creative, and we’re going to have to be bold and make tough decisions in order to salvage some semblance of quality education for our children in the next couple years and beyond,” said Barnett. “This is not just Chicken Little. This is not trying to scare people. This is real. We’re trying to save 100-plus-year-old institution.”