School layoffs OKd

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s Board of Education on Tuesday approved $12 million in cuts, setting in motion the eventual elimination of more than 120 full-time positions, more than half of them elementary school teachers, high school counselors and English as a Second Language instructors at the district’s adult education program.

The pair of resolutions, which called for layoffs in both classified and certificated positions, were unanimously approved by the board to balance the 2010-11 budget in the face of state cutbacks and declining property tax revenues locally.

“It is with heavy heart that we make these recommendations,” said Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard moments before the seven-member board voted. “It is, unfortunately, the world in which we find ourselves today. There’s a true crisis going on in public education. ... In spite of this horrible context, we have to correct our budgetary woes.”

Now the district will start to notify all of those employees who will lose their jobs, something that must be done by mid-March in order to become effective by mid-May, said Laura Boss, spokeswoman for the district.

“This was inevitable,” she said after the meeting. “We’ve done everything we could do up until this point, but there’s not much you can do when the state takes away $12 million from you.”

Each year, the district has come to rely on the state for something called “categorical funding.”

As the name suggests, it’s money that can be used only for certain categories and positions, whether it’s to pay the salaries of high school counselors, hire elementary school teachers who work in socially and economically diverse schools or foot the bill for adult education classes.

But this year the state is withdrawing its categorical funding to the tune of $12 million, which roughly equals a loss of $568 per student in the district, Boss said.

And if the state’s economic climate does not improve, those funds will not be available in the near future, a dilemma that’s putting hundreds of school districts across the state in somewhat of a quandary, Boss said.

Making matters worse is the fact that the school district’s $280-million budget is funded primarily by property tax revenues, and those revenues have either flat lined or declined in the past few years, giving the school district even less money to work with than it has had historically, Boss said.