I stopped dining at fancy restaurants last year. I haven’t seen my hair stylist in months. I’ve nixed my occasional visits to the coffee shop. And the only trips I’ll be taking in the near future are for business. Ah, the sacrifices we make when money is tight.

No one knows this more than school districts, which are used to doing more with less--- though they’ll have to be even more ingenious and penny-wise in today’s faltering economy. For the May edition of American School Board Journal, I explored the strategies and approaches that school districts take under financial duress.

“Any cut means someone is losing something,” Luz Cazares, the chief financial officer for Alameda Unified School District, said bluntly. The California district is one of many in the state that were blindsided by Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal of 10 percent across-the-board cuts to fill a $14.5 billion deficit.

Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget would mean a $4.8 billion reduction in education funding across the state; for Alameda it would mean $4.5 million in cuts for next year’s budget.
“The Governor has put us in a position to cut half of what it took us seven years to do,” Cazares said of the $7.7 million the district had to trim soon after student enrollment began to decline in 2000. “We were blindsided.”

As are parents and children, some of whom stood in trash cans during a recent visit by Schwarzenegger. "Our students/teachers/coaches are too valuable to throw away,” read signs each held.

“There’s nothing like showing up when the governor’s there and sticking read kids and real teachers in trash cans and saying, ‘You know what? This is what you’re doing,” Brook Briggance, a member of the Alameda Education Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor