HUNTINGTON BEACH : 300 Protest Cuts in Schools’ Budget

More than 300 parents, teachers and students packed a Huntington Beach Union High School District board meeting this week to protest $2.6 million in budget cuts recommended by the superintendent.

School nurses, swimmers, booster club presidents and the city’s mayor were among the 58 speakers who passionately criticized Supt. Lawrence Kemper’s fiscal plan during a nearly four-hour hearing Tuesday night.

Among other cuts, Kemper’s proposal would eliminate half of the district’s full-time nurses and counseling psychologists, eliminate its school-age mothers program, close a school swimming pool and curtail fine arts and other elective programs. As many as 28 teaching positions would be eliminated and 11 other employees would be laid off.

The district has already trimmed $11.6 million from its budget over the past five years to offset plummeting enrollment. Now, with the added burden of state budget cutbacks that will impact all California school districts, Kemper said his district will be forced to cut more programs and positions.

“We’re trying to keep the cuts as far away from the classroom as we can,” Kemper said. “But we’ve gotten to a point where we can’t keep that from happening any longer and continue running the district.”

Participants in the district’s school-age mothers program--including pregnant students and young mothers cradling infants--made a dramatic plea to save the program.

As proposed, the program would be discontinued, and pregnant students would instead be diverted into an independent-study curriculum.

“Going to a regular high school wouldn’t have been the same,” said program graduate Ira Rodriguez, bouncing her baby in her arms. The program, she said, “not only taught me how to be a good student, it taught me how to be a good mother.”

Several nurses and parents, including Huntington Beach Mayor Peter M. Green--whose son is a Marina High senior--called on the board to keep a school nurse at each of the district’s six regular high schools. The proposed cuts would eliminate three nursing positions, requiring the remaining three nurses to each serve two schools.

“There isn’t anyone more sympathetic with your dilemma than me,” Green told board members. “As mayor, we face the same problems of budget reductions. . . . But I strongly urge you to keep nurses on every campus, and I hope you will put the health, safety and welfare of students at the top of your list of priorities.”

Marina nurse Dianne Mastright, noting that school nurses help prevent disease, attend to medical emergencies and counsel child-abuse victims and emotionally troubled students, argued that eliminating nurses would allow such crises to continue unchecked.

“I can’t believe that we care so little that we would fail to meet the basic needs of our students in our high school district,” she said.