Crestfallen leaders of the Jefferson Union High School District struggled to come to grips Wednesday with the steep budget cuts they will need to enact after failure of Measure C.
“It’s very disappointing,” district Trustee Laurie Frater said. “I think all of us feel like we’ve been shot through the heart since last night.”
It is the second time in six months that the district has failed to pass a parcel tax to support academic and other programs at Daly City and Pacifica high schools. Frater said it’s too early to say whether the district will try again. Measure C, a $96-per-parcel tax that would have raised about $3 million a year over four years, received 59.5 percent of the vote but needed two-thirds to pass. It fared worse than Measure P, a nearly identical measure that garnered 65.8 percent of the vote in November.
Frater said low voter turnout — 24 percent countywide — may have contributed to Measure C’s demise. “You’re always going to get a core of people who are going to vote ‘no,’ no matter what, so you’ve got to get the word out, and we didn’t do it,” he said.
District Superintendent Mike Crilly and the board of trustees must now embark on another round of deep cuts. In recent years, the district has reduced its staff, eliminated summer school, increased class sizes in freshman math and English classes from 20 to 28 students, and dropped four days off the school year, Crilly said.
Now everything except core academic programs are at risk of drastic cuts, officials said, including athletics, music, art and drama. Teacher layoffs are also on the table. “We cannot continue to do exactly what we are doing right now,” Crilly said. The depth of the cuts depends on whether Gov. Jerry Brown is able to win voter approval for his proposal to extend certain state tax rates. If Brown’s plan fails, Jefferson will lose $3.7 million in funding next fiscal year, according to the nonprofit California Budget Project. “That’s getting to be bloodbath time,” said a dejected Frater, noting that district staffers have increasingly been asked to do more with less. “The only option now is to do less with less, and that’s what I find really sad.”
Jefferson ranks near the bottom among districts in San Mateo County and throughout the state in many measurements of school resources, including the amount spent per pupil, which has dropped by about $2,000 from $7,000 several years ago and will now likely plunge further, Frater said.
“I wish I could be more upbeat about this,” Frater said. “But I can’t see any silver lining in this cloud yet.”
The other two school districts in San Mateo County that asked voters to pass parcel taxes — Ravenswood and San Carlos — secured a majority of votes.
