The Pajaro Valley Unified School Board made a bold and some say careless decision last month, choosing not to layoff teachers, aides and vice principals to save $5 million from a budget that is headed toward deficit spending.
Four of the seven board members voted to hold off on the cuts, which Superintendent Heather Contreras warned could make the problem significantly worse next year.
This is one of the toughest challenges for the county’s largest school district with 27,000 students. Contreras explained to the board that the district was shrinking by 600 students over the next year and funding that was given to support schools during the pandemic has been cut.
Still, the four members who held off the cuts said they wanted to consider further options other than dropping needed staff.
The ideas of cutting teachers and mental health aides is chilling at a time when students are in dire need of support.
It’s so chilling that Aptos’s principal wrote a column in the Aptos Times asking for counselors to be saved.
“A student attempted to blow up my office last May,’ Alison Hanks-Sloan wrote, arguing against the cuts.
Now, this triggered more than a few red flags.
First: Why wasn’t this reported by both the sheriff’s office and the school district. The only release from the sheriff was that the office was vandalized.
As one TV station reported: “A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson confirmed to KION that they are investigating the incident as a vandalism/break-in and no arrests have been made yet.”
First trigger: why no mention of explosives?
Second trigger: with so much violence in our schools, why would we think of cutting the people who can most help troubled students?
Growing Up is in the process of investigating reports of violence in the schools and publishing a report in a future issue. There are big questions to be answered about how to keep the schools safer and to ensure that every student gets the education they are entitled to. More on this coming up in the months ahead. There’s an important article inside this issue on the vote.
On the lighter side, we want to remind you that Kids Day is coming up May 3 in downtown Santa Cruz, noon to 4pm. It’s our favorite day downtown, when schools, after school activities, arts, dance, music programs strut their stuff. Santa Cruz comes alive that day, so don’t forget to mark your calendars.
Our next issues will focus on summer camps, some of our most-read magazines of the year. It’s getting time to make those plans.
Write us at editor@growingupsc.com
Thanks for reading.
Brad Kava,
Editor and Publisher
