Bishop - Board, teachers and students brace for budget cuts at BUHS

The Bishop Joint Unified High School District Board of Trustees voted to prepare the school for staff cut-backs last week. The school board, teachers and students are still holding out hope that the governor’s education budget for next year will be rejected. If that happens, the school plans to keep its current staffing levels. Photo by Mike Gervais

Local students, faculty members and parents are pleading to their state representatives for more cash for education as schools across the state are facing a dwindling budget for next year. Smaller high schools, like those found in the Eastern Sierra, are expected to be among those hit hardest.

In the midst of this latest budget crunch, the Bishop Joint Unified High School District Board of Trustees is preparing for possible staff reductions in an attempt to keep the school running in the black, while students, educators and community members are engaged in a letter-writing campaign to urge legislators to preserve the school funding.
Though nothing is final, the school board last week approved possible staff reductions for teachers, administrators and “classified” staff, such as bus drivers, janitors and other non-certificated employees.
This move was made to allow administrators for Bishop Union High School to reduce the number of classes offered if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts for education become reality.
State legislators are expected to vote on the budget in June, and a two-thirds vote is required to pass the proposed cuts. The state education code requires schools to notify teachers no later than April that there may be layoffs.
But the school board and school staff are still holding onto hope that the state budget cuts will be rejected, and the school can keep its current staffing.
“The governor’s budget is very brutal to a small school like us,” Bishop Joint Union High School District Superintendent Maggie Kingsbury said. “I encourage you all to get out your pens and write” to local representatives, the governor and anyone in a position to influence finances for schools, she told spectators at last Tuesday’s school-board meeting.
When the school board heard in January that the governor was proposing a $4.8 billion budget cut to schools state-wide next year, it began investigating cost-saving measures. Locally, that budget cut is expected to result in Bishop Union High School losing $400,000 of its $7 million budget, a 6 percent decrease to schools in Bishop.
Two of the cost-saving measures that the school board has discussed include an idea to relocate Palisade Glacier High School from its current location in Big Pine to the Bishop Union High School basement, and to reduce staff hours at the high school by cutting classes and re-assigning teachers and administrators to different, or expanded duties.
Neither idea was accepted warmly by teachers and residents at the Feb. 12 school board meeting.
For example, if the governor’s budget is passed in June, the high school has the option of reducing the number of math classes it offers by combining periods and upping the number of students during each class period.
In other words, a teacher who this year is teaching five periods of Math classes at the high school may be reduced to two periods a day.
Many teachers at the school board meeting were concerned that the board was preparing to let staff go completely. But the board, along with Superintendant Kingsbury, assured teachers that a board resolution approved at the meeting merely “opened the door” for the cutbacks. If Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal gets shot down and the school’s budget is the same as last year’s, there will be no staff reductions.
But if the budget is approved, the school will have to implement the full extent of its proposed cutbacks.
“We’ve got a lot of money that we’ve got to cut out of the budget this year,” Kingsbury told the teachers and parents assembled at last week’s board meeting.

A group of students last Wednesday wrote letters to their state representatives requesting more funding for schools. Dozens of students, parents and faculty members participated in the “letter blitz.” Because of proposed budget cuts, Bishop Union High School may be facing staff cutbacks and the possible relocation of Palisade Glacier High School to the BUHS campus. Photo submitted

The resolution the school board passed last Tuesday called for a reduction of three periods of math classes, two in science, one in foreign language, two for physical education, one for choir, one for the AVID class, two wood shop classes and two auto shop classes.
“This really represents all the classes at Bishop High School,” Kingsbury said. “It really is affecting every department.
The only class that is facing extinction at Bishop High School is the choir class, Kingsbury said.
With each department at the school represented in the proposed setbacks, the school board’s next step will be to take a list of teachers at the school and categorize them based on seniority. Seniority, in this instance, Kingsbury said, will be based on a teacher’s tenure with Bishop Union High School.
But it’s not just the governor’s budget that is affecting the way local schools are doing business. “We are going down with kids in addition to the governor’s budget,” Kingsbury said. With declining attendance, the school district receives less state funding.
But the declining enrollment also gives the school board the chance to reduce the number of classes it offers and still provide equal opportunities for each and every student, it was noted.
In an effort to halt the layoffs, Bishop High School English teacher Angela Scott and others organized a voluntary “letter blitz” on Wednesday, Feb. 13. Scott and others invited students, parents and other faculty members to use their lunch hour on Wednesday to write to Assemblyman Bill Maze, Senator Roy Ashburn and the governor himself.
Dozens participated, and school staff members are hoping that more letters will be sent. Kingsbury said that the school will provide all the mailing information residents need to write their representatives.