By now, you’ve all heard the Governor’s budget proposal, which was made public last week.  He says he is ‘protecting education’ with this budget.  Frankly, if this is protection, I don’t want to see the alternative…Sacramento would probably take the shirt off my back, a pint of blood and my first-born.

Long story short, as of 1/19, it looks like another $8mil in cuts for CUSD if the governor’s budget goes as he planned.  There’s still a lot that can happen between now and whenever an actual state budget is passed, but you can guarantee it won’t be pretty.  It appears to be a tactic of the Governor to pit employee groups against each other (One of them being proposing changes to gas sales taxes that would set up a “schools vs. transit” scenario). Not cool.  In an email to the Faculty Senators last week, I told them I had spent Friday morning (1/15) at a Budget workshop presented by SI&A (School Innovations & Advocacy).  There were administrators in attendance from all over the valley.  It was very informative.  I also told the senators that based on what I learned at the workshop, things look mighty grim.  Through some incredibly imaginative math and a terribly complicated shell game, the Governor has manipulated the Prop 98 numbers to claim that education funding is at or above some of last year’s levels.  Other strange things the governor is basing his budget on involve his assertion that the Federal Government will magically pay California $7billion (yes, billion with a “b”) that they owe.  The Legislative Analyst office says that the reality is it might be $3bil…maybe.  Oh, and the great news is that the Governor proposes to FULLY FUND THE COLA….at -.38% (Here…let me write that out for you, just in case you think it’s a typo…  NEGATIVE Point three eight percent.) A fully-funded-negative-COLA…that’s a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it?  If you are scratching your head and saying “HUH?” you are not alone.

How do you fully fund a negative COLA, you might ask?  Well, you take the money off the revenue limit, that’s how.  How do you change Prop 98 guarantees, you want to know?  Well, you claim that since the level of funding certified in the language of Prop 98 was based on the state’s General Fund and the revenues to the state came in lower than estimated, the Prop 98 guarantee should be less.  Most of the governor’s proposals would require change in existing law…especially the Prop 98 stuff. 

It’s just nonsense. 

So what can we do?  In many ways, we should continue to do what we have always done.  We have to continue to provide quality educational experiences to our community, because they count on that.  We need to all do our best thinking to find ways to do more with less, whether it is conserving supplies or sharing resources. Most importantly, as employees, we have to prepare ourselves for difficult times and difficult decisions. 

Hang in there…

—-LisaMarie