Carpinteria District Cuts

I am very concerned with the proposed cuts to staff at Carpinteria schools and how it seems the Carpinteria Unified School District and Board are “hiding” staff cuts. If you look at the CUSD’s Proposed Budget Cuts, it looks like Carpinteria Schools are:

• Losing their long-term bus drivers (due to being cut to six hours, thereby losing their fully paid-for health benefits, and being forced to work a split shift).

• Cutting their High School Library Tech to only four hours a day (causing this person to lose benefits) and to have a busy, well-loved feature of the high school closed for most of the morning.

• Eliminating a night-shift custodian at the high school, and eliminating all the night custodians at Canalino Elementary School. (The District is planning on CHS, Rincon Continuation High School, and Canalino sharing one custodian).

What the Proposed Cuts do not show are:

• That there are five teachers retiring at the end of the year. On the high school side, none of these positions will be filled by new teachers, thereby raising class size.

• The Canalino Library Tech is retiring, and her position will not be filled. (The District’s plan is to have the current Aliso Elementary Library Tech split time between the two schools). This will seriously affect the libraries at both schools, as it will be very hard to run two successful programs.

• The high school will lose Weight Lifting, and Sports Medicine (two very popular classes).

If the Carpinteria School District needs to cut staff, I ask them, why they are cutting people who interact with our kids on a daily basis? The cuts above only hurt the Carpinteria community.

The Carpinteria Unified School District claims it needs to cut around $900,000 from our budget to keep a 6 percent reserve. My questions is, why do we need a 6 percent reserve when the state only requires a 3 percent? My next question is why are they cutting positions that directly affect South Santa Barbara County students? Why don’t they cut some of the chaff from the District Office (where they recently hired two “assistants” that have historically never been needed)?

My last question is why were the District offices just redecorated if they are low on funds? Why is funding going to “pet” projects instead of paying staff who work with our students?

If you are worried about the direction CUSD is going, please write to the School Board members or go to School Board meetings!