After months of agonizing over budget cuts, San Diego Unified quickly passed a budget Tuesday night that will lead to ballooned class sizes in kindergarten, second and third grade; suspended beloved programs that take students to places like Balboa Park; thinned bus routes and a slew of other cuts.
More than 1,400 positions were cut from the payroll, including more than 800 teachers, counselors, nurses and other educators. That accounts for more than one in 10 educators in the school district. All in all, the school district budget shrunk from $1.22 billion this year to $1.057 billion.
"Make no doubt about it, this board is very, very aware that passing this budget is going to cause grave damage to our schools in San Diego," school board member John Lee Evans said.
A raft of state bills would add new rules and regulations for California charter schools, setting up a showdown over just how far charters' famed freedoms will go.
The bills span a wide spread of subjects, from worker rights to conflicts of interest to classroom intercoms, but they have reignited the same age-old debate over freedoms between charter schools and their critics in unions and school boards.
State legislators have pushed for more restrictions on charters for many reasons: Some lawmakers were spurred to act by charter school scandals. Others want school districts to have more leeway to say no before a faulty charter opens. One argued that charter school admission rules were screening out students who might perform badly. And one wanted more rights for charter school workers.
In the last year, a national debate over whether there's a better way to judge teachers has exploded. The Obama administration has pushed schools to use what's known as "value-added data" to evaluate teachers and decide their pay.
A Los Angeles Times investigation last year pushed the issue out of academia and into the mainstream, inspiring strong backlash and fevered discussion.
The idea is simple: Measure how much each child improves over time, instead of simply how high they score.
After San Diegans turned down a new tax for schools last year, school board member John Lee Evans came up with a new idea: create a special fund that willing donors could chip into for school supplies.
Taxpayers who had been willing to pony up the $98 per parcel (or more) that the tax would have charged could give their money to the district voluntarily. He told the Union-Tribune that if just 10,000 people contributed that $98,they'd reap almost $1 million.
Five months later, the fund has raised a little less than $6,036. That is much less than the $50 million annually the tax would have reaped and less than some foundations drum up for specific schools. Evans said Monday that he wasn't surprised. Nobody had made phone calls to rustle up more donations.