By Len Feldman
To help address an anticipated $14.5 billion shortfall in funding for next year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for 10.8 percent across-the-board cuts for all services and the suspension of Proposition 98’s minimum funding guarantee.
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| Protecting Prop. 98’s education funding guarantee is CTA’s top priority, says President David A. Sanchez. |
Education’s share of the cuts would be $4.8 billion.
Making matters even worse is the governor’s declaration of a fiscal emergency, which would require another $400 million in cuts for education this year.
The net effect is about $800 less per student than K-12 education would normally receive. That’s equal to a cut of approximately $24,000 per classroom.
To make such drastic reductions, as CTA and its Education Coalition allies have told reporters at briefings in Sacramento and elsewhere around the state, schools would have to lay off an estimated 107,000 teachers or 137,000 school bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and other support professionals. Put another way, the proposed cuts would equal the cost of shutting down every school across the state for an entire month or increasing class size by as much as 35 percent statewide.
Even if schools eliminated all music, art and career technical programs across the state, they’d still have to look for more programmatic reductions.
“We can’t keep asking our students and schools to do more with less,” CTA President David A. Sanchez has told reporters. “True leadership means setting priorities, and it means implementing a balanced approach of spending cuts and revenue increases to close the $14.5 billion budget hole.”
School spending is not the cause of the state’s budget problem, say coalition members. In fact, in recent years the rate of increase in school spending has significantly lagged the increase in other state services.
Securing cuts of this magnitude will require a suspension of Prop. 98, which can only be accomplished with a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature. The governor’s proposal also calls for reforming the budget process and giving him the power to make unilateral midyear cuts. The Legislature is considering the provisions impacting this year’s budget in a special session this month.
CTA and coalition representatives have pledged to educate school supporters across the state about the impact these proposed cuts would have on continuing efforts to achieve educational excellence and to mobilize them in the effort to inform legislators as to the effect such cuts will have on local schools.
“We will not rest until we have done everything possible to maximize school funding and protect Prop. 98’s school funding guarantee,” says Sanchez.