Education
By Olivia Ruiz
Vida en el Valle | February 25, 2009

The budget will reduce education spending by $8.6 billion over two years, forcing schools to lay off teachers, slash salaries and postpone spending on construction and textbook purchases.

"I'm sitting here thinking I may have to loose up to about 7 or 8 of my teachers, new teachers who are invigorated with teaching us. It's going to be devastating," said Camacho, president of the California Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE).

"I'm guessing we maybe have to increase the primary classroom size by five to seven students to make ends meet," he said.

Camacho said he works with 45,000 school teachers in his district and each of the 600 schools will be affected.

Yet he understands that smaller schools districts will take the hardest hit.

"It's even worse on the smaller school districts in the Central Valley," he said. "Although Fresno is a large school district because you have Visalia, Madera and all those other schools districts. For the smaller ones when you're talking about loosing one, two or three million dollars it doesn't sound like very much but when you loose a certain amount of staff, the schools looses the support it needs to make it possible to run every day."

Camacho, who has been in the education field for 34 years, said although he has experience rough patches in the past, nothing compares to what the education system is going through today.

"About 10 years ago they had to cut about 10 percent of our salaries back and we really never regained from that. Now we are talking about bigger cuts," he said. "It's scary. The bailout money they're sending the state, not very much of is going to make it to the schools. That money is not going to make a big difference."

On a more positive note, four programs out of the 61 have been saved from any cuts or modifications: special education, K-3 class size reductions, school lunches, and economic impact aid.

The budget is not just impacting the K-12 grades but higher education as well. A 10 percent across-the-board cut will be implemented to the University of California and California State University systems, which equals to $264.4 million in lost funds.

For Michele Siqueiros, executive director of the non-profit Campaign for College Opportunities, which has offices in Modesto, Sacramento, Berkeley and Los Ángeles, those cuts mean that the UC system will have to turn away 2,300 students "that otherwise would have a spot at the university," she said and the CSU has to limit its enrollment by over 10,000 spots.

"We know that community colleges are going to cut courses and let go of faculty. It will be challenging," said Siqueiros.

Although community colleges can't turn away students like the other two systems can because they have a mandate of open enrollment.

"It's going to be harder for students to be able to find the classes they need, they're going to be sitting in larger class sizes, and it's going to take them longer to reach their goals, whether it's to transfer or get a certificate," the executive director said.

"I think those are disturbing trends at a time when we know that we need more educated workers. "