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 Los Alamitos Unified School District, the cuts translate into about $600,000 that must be trimmed this year.

However, the school district planned for the worst-case scenario, and the budget cut won’t lead to program or staff cuts this school year, said Los Alamitos Unified School District Superintendent Sherry Kropp.

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.

“Obviously, we don’t like the cuts, but we prepared for the worst case scenario,” Kropp said. 

Now the district will turn its attention to next year’s budget and will work with the school board and the union to develop another budget that factors in reductions in state funding, Kropp added.

Besides school-bus transportation, the state will also reduce its funding to schools by about $14 per student, said Patricia Meyer, deputy superintendent of the Los Alamitos Unified School District.

There is still a great deal of uncertainty in terms of planning for budget cuts next year because of additional triggers in the state budget, Meyer added.