Budget Crisis Meeting Schedule for SUSD

The Sunnyside Unified School District Governing Board hosted special meeting Mondayto deal with the bidget crisis that has slowly arisen in the district of late, according to a recent release from the district. The district, whose large amount of donors had made life a little easier fir everyone, is now on page with so many other districts across the country. The meeting heard from the Associated Education Association, the Sunnyside Classified Employees Association and the Sunnyside Administrators Association regarding the issue and what can be done about it.

Each group was given 30 minutes to address their budgetary concerns before the Superintendent’s Cabinet presented its budget savings recommendations. What will be interesting to see here is how any changes would affect the more than 2600 persons employed by the district or how it will impact Project Graduation – the district’s strongly proactive approach to increasing graduation numbers. The program, while effective, has required a very large amount of funds and will require even more to continue rolling out the future implementations.

The three groups offered two plans that could help the situations. One was not really a plan of action but rather just a hope that voter pass the 1 cent sales tax increase offered by Prop 100. The other, more serious offer, was cutting middling school sports programs and elementary and middle school music programs. While no one seemed keen on the latter, it was pretty clear that the general manner of thinking was what could be done to save jobs.

I personally think that more thought needs to go into this. SUSD a large amount of underpriveledged students who can’t afford to play organized sports anywhere else except for school. There are no real music programs offered for that age group around town either. We are talking about limiting the productions of the two primary extracurricular activities to these young kids and some of the only things keeping them out of trouble and giving them a release from the stress of school. Limiting these programs would be a short term fix to certain teacher’s pay rates but it’s a long term issue to the students it would affect.