District Supporters Protest Budget Cuts

By Jorge Casuso

April 6 -- Showing their solidarity with laid-off teachers and workers, about 1,000 demonstrators joined a “Pink Slip Parade” Saturday morning to protest State budget cuts that would slash 207 jobs from the cash-strapped school district.

The demonstrators filed through the Third Street Promenade hoisting signs that read “Save Our Schools,” then gathered at the southern end of the popular shopping strip for a series of passionate speeches denouncing the State cuts and urging support of a parcel tax in June.

"It's been said that it takes a village to raise a child,” School Supt. John Deasy told the crowd. “But it clearly takes the State to abandon every child to put us in this situation… With the decisions proposed in Sacramento, let’s cut the rhetoric of ‘leave no child behind’ and fess up to the reality that all children will be left behind.

“The startling situation need not be we have a crisis, but we still have choices,” Deasy concluded. “The full funding of public education is not a choice. It is not an option. It is a state’s mandate and a community’s imperative.”

The cuts -- approved by the School Board to help bridge a $13 million budget gap in the upcoming school year -- would eliminate 66 full-time teachers and 25 teachers in special programs, including all elementary music teachers, and increase class sizes in the lower grades.

The budget measures --- which include a hike in the price of school lunches and transportation -- also would eliminate all elementary library coordinators and physical education aids and specialists, many school nurses and service personnel and 12 administrators, including one principal.

District Mechanic Richard Bartolomeo painted a bleak picture of a school system decimated by the cuts, where “germs and bacteria (have) time to fester,” grass goes wild, libraries are “shut with the lights out,” “rows of computers (are) sitting idle” and callers are “put on hold for 30 minutes.”

“Imagine a school without nurses,” Bartolomeo said. “Imagine a school without music and art instruction. Schools without after school athletic programs. This is clearly not the school district I attended.

“The future of our children is more important than flowers on Pico, more important than speed bumps on the north side of Santa Monica or new trucks and buildings,” said Bartolomeo, enumerating some of the projects the City has recently funded. “I call on the City of Santa Monica and Malibu to double their contributions.”

While pledging to maintain the $3.5 million a year the City gives the district, Mayor Richard Bloom warned of the “storm clouds” that have gathered over local governments, noting that Santa Monica faces a budget crisis of its own. (City officials predict a shortfall of as much as $16 million in the upcoming fiscal year.)

“Every member of the Santa Monica City Council supports education,” said Bloom, whose two children attend public schools. “We’ve got to be there. We’ve got to hang together, and we will.”

But, the mayor warned, “the storm clouds are brewing, and they affect every single one of us. We need to stand united… We will do everything in our power to increase our help for public education. We have to take a stand.”

Bloom urged support for Measure S, the $225 parcel tax that would pump $6.5 million a year for six years into the district.

“Each and every one of you must be an ambassador,” Bloom said. “It’s arm to arm, person to person, handshake to handshake.”

Noting that he was “a public school educated human being,” former mayor Nat Trives told demonstrators that the business community has “stepped forward and we are supporting the schools one hundred percent.

“These cuts are so severe,” Trives warned. “Things are going to get worse, folks. We are all a family. We are all together. We cannot stand idly by and decimate our schools.”

Malibu High School principal Mike Mathews also warned of the dire consequences if Measure S fails to win the necessary 66 percent of the vote.