Though it wasn’t really his fault, Eric Smith sure wasn’t going to win any popularity contests with the crowd of mostly faculty, staff, and parents at the Santa Barbara School Board meeting this week. Thanks to the public education-destroying realities of the latest California state budget proposal, the Santa Barbara School Board needs to slash their general fund budget for the fourth time in the past year, after enduring several million in cuts to their roughly $119 million operating budget. District Deputy Superintendent Smith is the man tasked with figuring out where the next $6 million in necessary reductions can come from.
To that end, on Tuesday night, he presented a visibly pained board with a menu of potential reductions that, among other things, equal the unavoidable loss of teaching positions and popular school programs, bigger class sizes, and drastic reduction in school site maintenance. As Boardmember Annette Cordero lamented during the meeting, “All the things that were priorities to cut have already been cut. … Now we are getting to the things that we have all felt needed to be saved.”