Schools at a Risky Crossroad, Part 3–Logjam Breaks: Trustees Talk, Argue, Consider New Ideas-in Public

  • Steve Kiouses, John Fleming and Ken Hurst debate major changes to Frazier Mountain High School; as (next photos) Supt. Katie Kleier makes a point, Paula Regan gets sick and Anita Anderson listens intently.

    Image 1 of 5
    Steve Kiouses, John Fleming and Ken Hurst debate major changes to Frazier Mountain High School; as (next photos) Supt. Katie Kleier makes a point, Paula Regan gets sick and Anita Anderson listens intently.

  • Steve Kiouses, John Fleming and Ken Hurst debate major changes to Frazier Mountain High School; as (next photos) Supt. Katie Kleier makes a point, Paula Regan gets sick and Anita Anderson listens intently.

    Image 2 of 5
    Steve Kiouses, John Fleming and Ken Hurst debate major changes to Frazier Mountain High School; as (next photos) Supt. Katie Kleier makes a point, Paula Regan gets sick and Anita Anderson listens intently.

  • Supt. Katie Kleier makes a point, Paula Regan gets sick and Anita Anderson listens intently as (prior photos) Steve Kiouses, John Fleming and Ken Hurst debate major changes to Frazier Mountain High School.

    Image 3 of 5
    Supt. Katie Kleier makes a point, Paula Regan gets sick and Anita Anderson listens intently as (prior photos) Steve Kiouses, John Fleming and Ken Hurst debate major changes to Frazier Mountain High School.

  • El Tejon Unified School District Superintendent Katie Kleier showed the dramatic rise in deferrals of payments for schools from the state. She explained why ETUSD must plan for the worst. Parents listened closely, then spoke of the need for the district to focus on better dialogue with parents and suggested modernizing the ETUSD website.

    Image 4 of 5
    El Tejon Unified School District Superintendent Katie Kleier showed the dramatic rise in deferrals of payments for schools from the state. She explained why ETUSD must plan for the worst. Parents listened closely, then spoke of the need for the district to focus on better dialogue with parents and suggested modernizing the ETUSD website.

  • Parents listened closely as El Tejon Unified School District Superintendent Katie Kleier showed the dramatic rise in deferrals of payments for schools from the state. She explained why ETUSD must plan for the worst. Then parents spoke of the need for the district to focus on better dialogue with parents. They suggested modernizing the ETUSD website.

    Image 5 of 5
    Parents listened closely as El Tejon Unified School District Superintendent Katie Kleier showed the dramatic rise in deferrals of payments for schools from the state. She explained why ETUSD must plan for the worst. Then parents spoke of the need for the district to focus on better dialogue with parents. They suggested modernizing the ETUSD website.

By Patric Hedlund with Kelly Franti

After a long drought waiting to hear real ideas and hard facts debated by the ETUSD Board of Trustees in open session, the public finally got an earful in two special meetings last week, March 27 and 29. The result, by the end of the second meeting, was a tone of optimism that is likely to flow out into the community about local schools.

Act One

In Act One on Tuesday, Trustee Steve Kiouses said he is concerned about the district’s “qualified” budget status. He asked that “what-if” scenarios be given to the trustees to show how the district can balance its budget without depleting its reserves. He offered one scenario: turning Frazier Mountain High School into a science and technology magnet charter school “at the confluence of solar, wind and oil industries,” letting students not interested in such a program ride a bus to other districts. A parent rose and began yelling, demanding greater attention to the concerns of parents. Board Chair Paula Regan suddenly left the meeting, saying she was getting ill. The man said the goals and objectives of the board had failed. Vice Chair Ken Hurst took over, telling the man to calm down or to leave. He did leave for awhile, then came back and apologized.

Just prior to that, the board was reviewing its goals and objectives. Trustees were told that increase in Advanced Placement classes at the high school is on track, with more offered this year than in the past few years. Trustee John Fleming said “we have not met or exceeded our 2011-12 goals and they need to be rewritten.”

Trustee Anita Anderson said the board and the superintendent have had long-delayed “clean up” to do in the district on personnel and practices “that keep smacking us in the face.” She said they have made strides toward completing that work.

Trustee Steve Kiouses said that 45 percent of the district’s money is being spent on 39 percent of the students; with the high school subsidized by the other schools, adding: “Class size increase equals quality decrease equals loss of enrollment at all grade levels.” He said “we need a long-term plan for financial stability.”

Pine Mountain Learning Center (PMLC) parent Kelly Franti said the board’s top priority should be to collaborate more successfully with the community.

Act Two

In Act Two on Thursday, a dramatic change in atmosphere was evident. Parents were invited to speak, ask questions and make suggestions. Several parents made helpful suggestions. PMLC parent Michi Knight is researching an after-school enrichment program that may be available at no cost to the district. Parents from Frazier Park School told of using Facebook as a way to stay in close touch with PTSO members, and urged ETUSD to make upgrading the district website with workable content and utilities a priority.

Supt. Katie Kleier showed in a power point the state’s failure to pay money owed to California’s public schools, with a steep rise in unpaid “deferred” funding owed to the schools since 2008.

She explained that even if Governor Brown’s proposal on the November ballot passes, with a quarter percent sales tax increase and a graduated surcharge on incomes above $250,000 per year, that funding will pay back only a portion of what the schools are owed today, and even that would not occur until after December.

Meanwhile, state law demands that school districts submit their budgets to the state before July, even though they will not have adequate information about revenues for the year.

“We have control only over expenses, not over revenues,” Kleier said. She then presented a variety of radical cost-cutting scenarios to the board “if it decides that presenting a budget not labelled ‘qualified,’ by the state is its top priority.” State certifications of school district budgets are classified as positive, qualified or negative.

During this presentation, Kleier and fiscal manager Terri Geivet both explained to the board that some school administrators in these difficult times feel that having the label “qualified” is not such a bad thing.

The “qualified” status means that the district may not be able to meet all its bills in 2015 if nothing changes in the state’s allocation practices and if enrollment continues to decrease.

Kleier and Geivet expressed that if the state legislature continues to defer paying the schools, “perhaps we should be less concerned about the label the state puts on the budget we present to survive under these conditions.”

Kleier said that rural schools such as ETUSD’s are doubly handicapped because the state intends to stop subsidizing the busing of students, about $389,000 of ETUSD’s annual $512,000 bus costs. In 2009, Tehachapi Unified School District began charging students a $265 annual fee for bus passes. Low income waivers are offered. Kleier said she would present a proposed bus pass fee to the board.

In the Thursday meeting, she passed out “scenario” sheets explaining how much could be saved by closing the Continuation High School and consolidating students into a 7th-12th grade facility on one campus by “mothballing” either FMHS or the El Tejon School campus.

A downside of having a “unified” school district is that FMHS receives less per student than the Kern High School District, for instance, which receives $7,300 per student. Kiouses, in his Tuesday presentation, used the sums of $6,200 being spent per high school student, $5,800 per middle school student and $3,899 for elementary pupils.

Trustees agreed that high school programs are more expensive to run, and FMHS is subsidized by Frazier Park and El Tejon Schools.

Trustee Anita Anderson said that former superintendent Shelly Mason “asked if Kern County would take over the high school,” several years ago, but was told they were not interested in running it here.

ETUSD classified employees’ union representative, and grandmother of an ETUSD student, Angela Witham said, “We built that high school in 1991 so our kids would not have to be bused down the Grapevine, so they can be educated close to home.”

There was an energetic and positive tone in the room as the meeting adjourned. A series of public forums hosted by members of the community rather than the district was suggested, focused on maintaining and reclaiming excellence in the schools as they downsize.

To Be Continued Next Week

More will be reported next week about details of these meetings.

This is part of the April 06, 2012 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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