Lake County school districts faced with over $5 million in revenue reductions were forced to make tough decisions, cutting staff and services for the upcoming 2010-11 school year.

Since staff make up over 85 percent of their budgets, the majority of the cuts involved reducing staffing. Across the county 39 teaching positions, 42 classified support staff positions and eight administrator or counseling positions were projected to be cut for the 2010 school year.

The staff reductions will not be finalized until May.

In some years, some of the reductions were rescinded later in the summer when other funds or reductions were used to bridge the loss of state funding.

This year district superintendents and school board members are very pessimistic about being able to create a “summer miracle” that in the past has allowed school districts to return some of the staff cut, back to work in the fall.

I am also pessimistic. Our schools have had to endure three straight years of reduced funding and they have exhausted all their other options.

The fact is that California’s budget is still in terrible shape and in spite of opinion polls that show that the public clearly wants public education protected; the governor and the Legislature have avoided fixing the systemic problems with budget.

Instead they have chosen to mortgage the future and look to cut education as a way to balance the budget. The Legislature is currently working on the 2010-2011 budget. I am not hopeful that they will rollback the governor’s call to again make devastating cuts to education budgets.

In Lake County the cuts to education proposed by the governor are compounded by the ongoing decline in school enrollments.

In the last three years our public schools have lost 677 students. Private schools have fared no better, losing 113 students in the same time frame.

Double digit unemployment, which has now reached over 19 percent, is one of the prime reasons for the decline in enrollment. Families are unable to stay in our county when stable jobs are not available. Since schools are funded by how many students attend school, declining enrollment created a $3.5 million funding loss for our school budgets over the past three years.

In addition, the governor recently signed legislation that continues the state’s practice of deferring the revenue payments to schools in order to help the state avoid having to borrow money to pay its obligations.

This means school districts will, in many cases, be the ones forced to borrow money to cover payroll and other obligations. This is like having your employer say I am short on cash this month and I will pay you later in the year – thus forcing you to use your own credit card to buy food and pay your bills.

When you add to these challenges, the governor‘s devastating cuts of over $432 per student, the result is a crisis for our schools.

Our school districts have worked hard to try and make cuts as far from the classroom as possible. district school boards have voted to make reductions in bus routes, after school support programs, elimination of some vocational programs, elimination of K-8 summer school, elimination of academic enrichment programs like GATE and AVID, reduced athletics at the middles school level, reduced library hours, reduced elementary school music programs, reduced school counseling programs and reduced administrative staff and support staff.

But school districts have also been forced to make the tough decisions to reduce teaching staff. These reductions will increase class sizes.

In the primary grades, class sizes will climb from 20 up to 24 and in some cases higher. Upper elementary grades and high school classes will grow in size, topping 35 students in some schools. This will clearly impact the quality of the educational experience for our students.

When asked what the community can do, as superintendents we have one voice – please join us in letting your state legislator know how important education is to our future.

As someone once said “You can’t light a match twice.”

These are lost opportunities to provide the high quality education our children deserve and our future demands. Our teachers and support staff are working as hard as they can but we can’t expect them to be successful if we don’t provide them the resources they need.

Every year the needs of our students become more diverse and challenging and every year we are asked to strip away more and more of the resources needed in our schools.

Please join the educators in our county in demanding that our state legislators put a halt to their assault on education – the education our children need and deserve.

Dave Geck is Lake County's superintendent of schools.