Some highlights from the Oakland school board discussion on Superintendent Tony Smith’s proposal for cutting $39 million from the general purpose budget. Note: District staff will bring back a report, later, on the “restricted” side of the budget, as well as the impact of the proposed cuts on individual school budgets.

Tony Smith: “This is ongoing work and getting clear on what are our priorities … We’re going to keep working on this… Just to be clear, we will keep working on this until we come to board for the vote (in June).”

Jumoke Hinton Hodge: “I want to support the direction that this is going in. … Let’s keep going down this road, but I feel comfortable and safe on this particular path.”

David Kakishiba: “Upkeep of the facilities has always been the number one complaint we receive as school board members…. I need some degree of confidence that we’re not going in the toilet around our facilities.” Read the rest of this entry »

It was pretty darn somber in the board room a few minutes ago as CFO Vernon Hal gave his presentation on the impact of the $39 million budget cut.

The updated slides posted on tonight’s agenda (Page 4) give even more detail about how the pain will be shared and felt, from reduced mental health services and fewer school security officers to slower response time for facilities problems. The district is developing an online time card, for example, because there just won’t be enough people in the payroll department to handle the processing. Seasonal tree pruning? No more.

(Note: The proposal would eliminate most outside contracts for professional development.)

At least Hal is optimistic. “At the end of the day, we have to be fiscally responsible and accountable,” he said. “You have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. … We are smart people who can come together and get it done because we have to.”

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve been writing Twitter updates from the meeting (from my cell phone, since OUSD blocks social networking Web sites). You can read them, even if you don’t have a Twitter account, at http://twitter.com/katymurphy.

Update: If your software is stuck in the early 2000s, as mine is, and you had trouble opening the budget proposal, try this version. (It takes longer than usual to load; I almost gave up when testing it out.)

Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith’s proposal to cut next school year’s budget by $39 million includes deep cuts to central services — 74 positions eliminated out of 734 — and several one-time budget plugs totalling $8 million.

As promised, about two-thirds of the reductions would come from the central office and sources other than K-12 school budgets.

I should note, however, that some of those “central” cuts aren’t that far removed from the students. Read the rest of this entry »

Gov. Schwarzenegger promised to protect education funding last week. I guess that all depends on how you define “protect.”

At the board meeting just now, Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith said the district’s budget hole for 2010-11 — once projected at about $28 million — will deepen to nearly $36 million if the governor’s proposal holds.

That’s about $201 per student.

I just received a transcript of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s State of the State Address, which he opened with a story of teamwork — between his family’s miniature pony and pot-bellied pig.

Later in the speech, the governor said he would “protect education funding,” despite the state’s projected $20 billion deficit through the end of 2010-11.

That’s a tall order without raising taxes, since education makes up roughly half of the budget, so I’ll be curious to see the details of his budget plan on Friday. Maybe the state Legislators will take his pony and pig story to heart.

Here’s an excerpt of his speech:

Now, I will address our immediate budget situation more fully in a few days, when I present my budget but let me just give you an overview. Read the rest of this entry »

Tribune file photo

I can’t imagine spending a year of my life trying to come up with a school parcel tax measure that is palatable to Oakland’s edu-political extremes, but some brave souls have done just that. And, believe it or not, the democratic process behind simply crafting the ballot measure has yet to run its course.

Maybe you can help the parcel tax coalition and the Oakland school board (that, or further muddy the waters!), by opining on the following points that are still up for debate. That is, if you think the school district should float another parcel tax to boost the compensation of its employees in the first place.

Should the measure…

a) go on the June 2010 ballot Read the rest of this entry »

Oakland’s adult education programs would be slashed by nearly 40 percent in 2010-11 ($4.5 million of the $11.5 million they currently receive in state funding), if preliminary budget recommendations made by Superintendent Tony Smith are approved by the school board in January.

The recommendations, to be discussed at Wednesday’s school board meeting and voted on Jan. 27, contain few specifics, such as which services (aside from adult ed) would be cut and by how much. But the presentation does give us an idea of how the pain of a $28 million cut – Oakland Unified’s projected deficit for the 2010-11 school year — might be shared across the district.

K-12 schools would absorb $9.3 million of the $28 million reduction, which means Read the rest of this entry »

District staff are recommending that Explore Middle School, a small school that opened in East Oakland in 2004, close at the end of the year.

Also on the 2010 closure list are two schools that were scheduled to close a year or two down the road, following a lengthy phase out: BEST High School (McClymonds campus in West Oakland) and Paul Robeson School of Visual and Performing Arts (Fremont campus in East Oakland).

Staff didn’t come out with a definitive recommendation for Martin Luther King Jr. and Lafayette elementary schools in West Oakland Read the rest of this entry »

Soon, the McClymonds high school campus will have just one small high school, instead of two.

District staff is recommending that BEST High School close in June — a year earlier than planned, Chief Academic Officer Brad Stam told a crowd gathered at the McClymonds cafeteria tonight.

Stam said it would be unfair to BEST students and too costly for the school district to keep it open next year with just a few dozen students, and that this year’s juniors (the youngest class at BEST) will likely attend EXCEL, the other high school, next fall. This year, the school district is providing a subsidy of about $330,000, Stam said.

EXCEL’s enrollment has dwindled to less than 250, and just 65 juniors and seniors attend BEST, according to a recent districtwide data report. In 2004-05, the year before McClymonds split into two schools as part of the Gates-funded small schools reform, 761 kids went to the West Oakland high school, according to data from the California Department of Education. Read the rest of this entry »

THURSDAY UPDATE: You can find the memo here.

A survey of Oakland principals by a local advocacy group found support for the district’s unorthodox, largely decentralized school budgeting system, known as RBB; it also found that one-third of the principals surveyed didn’t feel prepared or equipped to run their entire school budget, as they’re expected to do.

A memo to the superintendent and school board, which contains the survey results and recommendations, was led by Think College Now Principal David Silver and Esperanza (at Stonehurst) Principal Sondra Aguilera. It was staffed by Great Oakland Public Schools, a coalition that supports greater school autonomy, so I would have been surprised if the survey found that principals disliked the model. About half of the OUSD principals completed the survey.

Here is a summary of the findings, straight from the memo: Read the rest of this entry »