San Diego Unified school board President Richard Barrera says the decisions he's faced have boiled down to this: either risk the education of children or risk the district's financial health.
"[T]hat's the situation we've been in, over and over and over again," he says in an in anin-depth, back-and-forth conversation with our Will Carless over the district's money mess.
Barrera blames the state for pushing the district to the brink of insolvency, though thedistrict's own gambles now have the very real potential to compound the problem.
Ever since his election in 2008, Richard Barrera has been gambling. He says he never wanted to pit kids' welfares against fiscal responsibility. Nor did he want to use class sizes or teacher pay as chips. But Barrera says he and his colleagues on the San Diego Unified School Board have been forced by anirresponsible state government into making terrible decisions at a terrible time.
The gambles Barrera and his colleagues have made have been dependent largely on the state's finances turning around drastically. They haven't, and it could be about to cost the school district its financial independence.
Barrera says those choices had to be made, and defends them passionately. He says the gambles he and his colleagues took were based on cold, hard reasoning and were not, as may be suggested by his background as a union organizer, as a result of any allegiance to the district's labor unions.
Our Scott Lewis appeared on KPBS's Roundtable on Oct. 14, along with Kyla Calvert, KPBS education reporter, to talk about the week's big news.
They discussed fake Twitter accounts created to parody local politicos and how San Diego Unified School District's financial problems could send it toward insolvency.
To listen, click on this link and start the audio player at the 4:15 mark.
If San Diego Unified eliminated all funding for middle schools, it would still fall $9 million short of resolving a $100 million budget shortfall next year.
No one in the district is proposing to wipe out middle schools, but the funding comparison helps put a number in perspective that district officials and local news media have increasingly cited in the last week.
San Diego Unified's top officials say the district could face a deficit between $60 million and $115 million after possible state cuts and have begun warning of future insolvency and a state takeover. As we've explained, that scenario would spur a radical shift in the district's operations for decades to come.
A quick note to readers:
You may have noticed a break in my running investigation of San Diego Unified's radical shift to include much of its population of students with special needs in general education classrooms.
As an organization, we've made a decision to put that on pause to examine theextraordinary breaking news that emerged last week about San Diego Unified School District's possible looming insolvency.
