WILDOMAR: Trustees plan to discuss school closure Tuesday

Parents, teachers oppose shutting Jean Hayman

By RANI GUPTA - Staff Writer | Friday, April 18, 2008 7:02 PM PDT ∞

WILDOMAR ---- School trustees are scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to close Jean Hayman Elementary in the fall to bridge an expected budget gap.

Late Thursday, Lake Elsinore Unified School District trustees said they must consider temporarily closing the school because of the money it would save, regardless of the pleas of parents and school staff members to keep the school open.

"It's too large of a number not to take advantage of," board President Kim Cousins said.

Despite cutting almost $9 million from the current year's budget and the 2008-09 budget, the district still expects a $1.7 million gap next school year, said Darrin Watters, the district's assistant superintendent of business services. The school district has a budget of about $170 million this year.

Many of the remaining budget-cutting proposals ---- including salary freezes or work-year reductions ---- would require approval from the teachers union or the nonteaching union. After Superintendent Frank Passarella said he doubted either union would agree to the cuts, trustees said they saw no alternative but to move ahead on closing the Wildomar campus.

During Thursday's meeting, parents and teachers spoke out against shutting Hayman, saying it would destroy a close-knit culture where many families walk their children to school.

"It will be a travesty if you decide to close that school," teacher James Castagneto said.

However, trustees didn't discuss the budget until late that night. The public meeting started almost an hour late and included lengthy presentations, including high school students' performances of songs from the musical "Oklahoma!" By the time the budget presentation rolled around about 11 p.m., all but a handful of the Hayman supporters had left.

That angered Wibert Melton, who missed work to attend Thursday's meeting and was one of the few people still around for the Hayman talk.

"I think they've already made the decision and don't want the public to see," said Melton, who has two sons and a niece at the school. "I think it's wrong what they're doing. Just wrong."

Trustee Jon Gray said Friday that trustees haven't yet decided whether to close Hayman. But he said trustees keep returning to the idea because a school closure is "a big-ticket item" that would save more money than other measures on the table. Closing Hayman makes sense, he said, because the school could be renovated while it is not in use.

"I don't like the idea we might have to close Hayman," Gray said. "I don't like it at all. But I don't see any other way to solve the budget problem."

It's not clear how much the district would save by closing Hayman. Watters said it costs $815,000 to operate the school, not including the teachers who would follow the students to other campuses. The exact savings couldn't be determined, Watters said, until district trustees decide on issues such as how Hayman students would be reassigned.

The only option trustees took off the table Thursday was eliminating the district's busing program. However, trustees did vote to increase the price of a regular yearlong bus pass by $20 to $300 next school year. Students who qualify for reduced-price passes because of their family's income level would pay $200 for an annual pass, $60 more than they pay now.

District officials said Thursday they were concerned about the cost of providing substitutes for teachers and nonteaching employees, which has increased by almost $600,000 over the same time last year. Trustee Tom Thomas said employees are clearly abusing the use of sick days and personal days and urged district officials to investigate further.

Even if trustees decide to close Hayman, Cousins said the district won't balance its budget without talking to the unions about concessions. Cousins and Thomas didn't return calls for comment Friday afternoon.

Teachers union President Karl Stuck said agreeing to salary cuts would be premature "without further information as to what's going to actually happen with the state budget cuts."

Jeanette Collins, president of the local chapter of the California School Employees Association, said trustees are unfairly blaming the unions and treating them like "bad children."

Collins said her union, which represents nonteaching employees such as bus drivers and clerical staff, won't agree to reductions because union employees haven't yet received raises for the school year that started in August. The school board declared an impasse in negotiations in February.

"We understand the budget cuts and what the governor has done," Collins said, "but it seems like our district started pre-emptively slashing and seems to be getting further and further into debt every meeting they have."

Indeed, district officials now expect a larger shortfall than previously stated. District spokesman Jose Carvajal said expenses such as teacher salaries and benefits for retirees are higher than expected. At the same time, the district is expecting less money from the state because of declining enrollment, Carvajal said.

School officials expect state legislators to loosen restrictions on how districts can spend money now earmarked for specific expenses. But Passarella said legislators are unlikely to act before June 30, when the districts are required to adopt a balanced budget based on the information that's available at the time.

"Darrin (Watters) can't put a line item in that says, 'We hear it's looking good,'" Passarella said.

Temecula school officials cited the expected flexibility in spending earmarked money when they informally decided against closing an elementary school for the 2008-09 school year. Superintendent Carol Leighty has said announcing a school closure that wasn't needed would cause too much disruption and wouldn't save enough money to bridge the budget shortfall.

However, Rollin Edmunds, the Riverside County Office of Education's director of district fiscal and administrative services, said school districts should not assume legislators will loosen regulations when building their budgets.

"Unless there's some action taken, they can't really use those alternatives as far as we're concerned," Edmunds said.

The meeting on closing Hayman will start at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Ortega High School, 520 Chaney St.

Contact staff writer Rani Gupta at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2625, or rgupta@californian.com.