No Drastic Midyear Cuts For Schools, Brown Says

School districts were mostly spared from the midyear cuts announced by Gov. Brown.

Local school districts will see some reductions, but nothing like the millions of dollars they were facing. For Long Beach Unified School District, the cuts translate into about $4.2 million that is being lost.

The local cuts will mostly come from the transportation budget, but are being covered by reserve funds, according to Long Beach Unified School District Public Information Officer Chris Eftychiou.

“We could have been hit with cuts of up to $24 million,” Eftychiou told Patch.  “We’ll dip into the reserves with no major cuts planned for the remainder of the school year.”

Brown said because the state fell $2.2 billion short of the rosy projections anticipated by the state budget the Legislature passed in June, he would have to pull the trigger on some – but not all – of the cuts called for in the budget.

Hardest hit will be higher education, services for the disabled and childcare, according to several published reports. K-12 schools will see a small hit – about $248 million – to school-bus transportation, a far cry of the up to $1.5 billion cut schools could have faced.

"It turns out the cuts are far less than they would have been," Brown said.

More cuts in the LBUSD budget are likely for 2012, even thought the state has cut over $330 milion in funding to LBUSD since 2007.

The state budget also has triggers for further cuts for next year, leaving LBUSD in a precarious situation.

“We have no palatable options left because of cuts already made over the last eight years,” Eftychoiu said.

Though the state mandates that school districts maintain a 2% reserve fund, Eftychiou noted that by using the monetary reserves, more cuts from the state could completely drain the LBUSD cash reserves in two years.