School Board Candidates Talk Budget Cuts

School board candidates— and incumbents and —participated in a candidate forum Friday night at the It was hosted by Vecinos de South Pasadena, the and the League of Woman Voters.

We'll be posting parts of the debate throughout the day.

First up: What would your priorities be when budget cuts have to be made?

Ben Figueroa

The district has tough choices and less and less resources. The last few years have been touch choices trying to decide between class sizes, salaries, other priorities. I will tell you what is not going to be, is to increase class sizes. It was increased recently; it was increased to 36. Every classroom through fourth grade has a capacity of 36 students. And that’s just wrong. I know we have furlough days scheduled because of the state triggers, but furlough days really impact the students. Of course it affects the faculty, but really it’s the students. I think the choices we have to make is if we need to look at our resources, we need to pull back on the other things we are doing including salaries.

Joseph Loo

With budget cuts, we really have worked quite hard to make sure our programs are efficient and what we’ve really done is reached out to our partners—SPEF, PTA, Chamber—and we continue to reach out—PCC—to bring additional resources to us. So I think in this day of budget cuts, of budget reductions, that we have to be careful on what is possible and what is not. We negotiate with our unions to have classes. For example they are 34 to 1 now. And we continue to negotiate with our labor unions, with our partners to see what other programs we can bring, how we can make them efficient.

We’ve also tried to increase our revenue. We have a preschool program that more than pays for itself. We have an extended day program that more that pays for itself. We have a revenue stream from the Oneona School—it’s a lease. We are looking on developing our parking lot for retail and additional revenue streams. I think that although revenues are cut from the state, we’ve been really out-of-the-box thinking.

Richard Sonner

We have cut and cut over the last years. A big part of what we have to do is decide is if there are programs we can cut, money that we can sweep out of specific funds in the general budget and how we manage our negotiations with our union groups. I don’t see a lot more that can be cut other than salaries. And by salaries, I mean this is a negotiated issue.

When we talk about increased class sizes or furlough days, that’s a give and take where a pure salary cut versus a salary cut for decreased work or increased class size is something that happens through the negotiation process. So we are going to have to work with our employee groups, with our administration to figure out how to handle any decreases because salaries are by far our biggest category of spending after all the massive cuts recently.

Locally, we have done a good job of trying to generate and use effectively our resources. The parcel tax is being used exactly for the language that it was written. We have great fundraisers through SPEF, the Booster Club, PTA. We are trying to use our facilities to generate revenue as well.