Quick Take
The Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s board of trustees voted to make reductions to district programs funded by one-time pandemic-era funding, including its mental health clinician program. The trustees needed to slash $5 million from the district’s budget based on recommendations from its “sustainable budget team.”
Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s board of trustees followed through with slashing more than $5 million from its budget for the next fiscal year by making cuts to the programs funded by one-time pandemic-era federal aid.
The board’s first meeting of the year went late into Wednesday night as trustees went back and forth on alternatives to budget cuts recommended by the district’s “sustainable budget team” to avoid cutting spending on social-emotional counselors and mental health clinicians.
After more than an hour of discussion, the trustees voted to cut $750,000 of the district office budget, along with $600,000 in reductions to its academic coordinator budget and $1.3 million in cuts to elementary staff. It also cut budgets for both social-emotional counseling services and mental health clinicians by $500,000 each.
Trustees also decided to make $1 million in reductions to the district’s contract with Pajaro Valley Prevention & Student Assistance (PVPSA) in order to avoid making deeper cuts to social-emotional counseling and mental health services. PVPSA is a nonprofit that offers mental health services and health education in the Watsonville area and is also partnering with the district to provide services.
In order to reach $5 million in budget reductions, trustees also voted to make $500,000 in reductions to the intervention teacher budget.
There is not a clear number of how many district staff and teachers will be affected due to these budget cuts.
Only newly elected trustees Jessica Carrasco and Gabriel Medina voted against approving the cuts. However, some trustees disagreed with the recommended cuts to the social-emotional counselors and mental health clinicians.
“I would like to ask if maybe we can try to give this another stab because, unfortunately, all three options have cutting mental health, which doesn’t really give me much of a choice in this,” said trustee Misty Navarro.
Trustees Daniel Dodge Jr. and Carrasco also expressed wanting more time to look for alternatives solutions that wouldn’t hurt the mental health program. “I can’t vote on these choices because I ran a campaign on empowering students, and I don’t see these choices doing that,” Carrasco said.
However, Superintendent Heather Contreras warned that if the trustees didn’t vote on budget cuts, the district would enter deficit spending and could be forced to make even bigger cuts in the future. If the board was unable to address its budget challenges, the state could take over and make its own cuts, she said.
“We could do nothing tonight, but that just means we’re all going to have to come back next year and $15 million, or some outrageous number, to cut,” said board president Olivia Flores.
More than 20 students, teachers and district staff spoke out against the proposed budget cuts to the district’s mental health program. Students recounted how the clinicians have helped them with their mental health issues, telling trustees the budget cuts would be a disservice to them.
Social-emotional counselors said that many of the students take advantage of these services because they are readily available, in comparison to PVPSA, where students might need to wait almost three weeks before seeing a mental health professional.
“We apologize to anyone that this impacts, and especially our students,” said Flores.
The sustainable budget team — consisting of parents, educators, labor union representatives, administrators and community organizations — was tasked with making recommendations to the board on how to trim the budget. The team focused on cutting spending from programs funded by expiring pandemic-era federal aid and reducing the number of staff positions due to enrollment declining.
The budget team presented three potential options for the board to consider. Each option cut drastically into the district’s mental health program. The recommendations looked to eliminate between $1.25 million and $1.5 million from the mental health clinician budget.
Under the budget team’s suggestions, social-emotional counseling would lose $750,000 to $1 million from its $2.19 million budget, threatening positions added during the pandemic. The district currently has 22 full-time social-emotional counselors, almost double the number it had in the 2019-20 school year.
Nora Yerena, member of the budget committee and co-director of Watsonville-based Raíces y Cariño, said the committee had a difficult task of identifying potential cost-saving measures to address a potential budget deficit.
“Not a single person on this committee, not Dr. Contreras here, not anyone, not anyone in the community, not any student – no one wants these cuts,” Yerena said.
Yerena added that as a collective, the budget team felt like it didn’t have all of the necessary information, such as understanding the role of mental health clinicians and their impact on students in the district.
The team also suggested making $750,000 in cuts to the district office budget and $1.3 million in reductions to elementary staff, due to declining enrollment. Reductions to the district’s contract with PVPSA between $500,000 and $1 million were also suggested by the budget team.
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