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Mostly Cloudy Long Beach Board of Ed talks budget one last time before vote
School officials discuss teacher salaries, skyrocketing pension costs and maintaining programs
A week before residents head to the polls to vote on the school budget May 15, the Board of Education gave a brief, final presentation on the district’s $122.1 million spending plan for 2012-13 at its meeting on Tuesday, where residents continued to raise a number of concerns.
The school board and administration said that the district operated under the state-mandated 2 percent tax cap to achieve very specific goals this year, including maintaining all existing programs.
“We had to develop a budget that worked under the tax levy cap, knowing that the tax levy cap was going to be in place for multiple years,” said Schools Superintendent David Weiss. “We wanted to ensure that we maintained our academic programs, that we moved forward with initiatives that we started, that we indentified additional needs and that we continue to build an academic program which would meet the needs of our students and would in fact keep the district moving forward.”
To do so, school officials said they made divisive, across the board budget cuts that wouldn’t cause “finger pointing.”
“Very often, elementary folks will say to cut the high school, high school folks will say to cut the elementary, sports folks will say cut music and music folks will say cut sports,” Weiss said.
“We’ve taken reductions in the teaching staff and administration…there are also reductions in non-instructional staff…and we also did across the board trimming.”
Long Beach resident Kevin Heller, however, said when he looks at the budget, what stands out most is the high proportion from rising salary and pension and health care cost for teachers.
“It’s my hope that if the budget is passed, that the issue of rising costs that are a part of our budget are dealt with and it’s my hope that if the budget does get voted down that all responsible parties — yourselves and the unions included — do everything in their power to avoid the dramatic cuts that you’re proposing here because I certainly don’t want to see the kids suffer.”
