More than 30 Catalina Foothills School District teachers and counselors would lose their jobs, classes would get larger and gifted education and extracurricular activities would get cut under next year's budget proposal.
"This is an extraordinary recommendation in an extraordinary context," District Superintendent Mary Kamerzell told the district's governing board at a March 10 meeting.
The proposed cuts, which amount to a maximum $2.7 million, would come on top of $540,000 in budget reductions made this year, the superintendent said.
Next year's budget proposal also includes frozen salaries for all but a few district employees, school closures during breaks and a four-day workweek for employees who work during the summer.
The district also would stop busing about 15 Tanque Verde Unified School District students to Catalina Foothills High School. The move would save $31,000.
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The arrangement goes back to the days when Tanque Verde lacked a high school, Kamerzell said.
The proposed budget assumes a major drop in state funding but is not definitive, the superintendent said.
"We don't know, and we certainly hope, that any cuts we have to make will fall short of this," she said the day after the meeting.
Parent Marc Orbach urged the board to preserve gifted education, saying it sets apart Catalina Foothills from other districts.
Kathy Anderson, who has three children in the district, predicted the proposed cuts would upset many in the community.
"If we work together as a community, we can overcome this," Anderson said after the meeting.
A unified community response to the district's budget woes is exactly what board member Sherri Silverberg advocated.
It may be that extracurricular activities have to rely more on tax credits and higher fees, she said.
Administrators don't have final student enrollment figures for the next academic year. If that number rises, so does revenue the state pays per pupil.
The district this year has 4,857 students at its seven schools. Fifteen percent of them, or 720, live outside the district.
"We certainly hope that we will have an enrollment increase, and that helps to mitigate also the budget deficit," Kamerzell said.
She cited other variables.
"Federal stimulus money, what the state does at the legislative level, our enrollment. And you put all that together and it's hard to predict."
The budget that Kamerzell presented is probably "a realistic scenario given the economic state," said board President Mary Lou Richerson.
Administrators will have more detailed information when they report back to the board March 31. The 6:30 p.m. meeting will be held at the high school, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive.
The board must adopt the 2009-10 budget by July.
