Lookout Santa Cruz
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Facing millions in budget shortfalls, Pajaro Valley and Live Oak school districts expect to make deep spending cuts as pandemic-relief funding expires and they confront the effects of declining enrollment. For PVUSD, that is likely to mean slashing expenses for mental health staff and programs.
Selene Avila’s six-year-old daughter struggled to make friends last year in her transitional kindergarten class in Calabasas Elementary School in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District until a social emotional counselor helped teach her daughter about personal boundaries.
“They taught her simple things, like asking before you go to hug people. It’s something that my husband and I talked to her about before, right?” Avila said. “But I feel like coming from somebody else, she could take it more into consideration.”
Avila herself works as a social emotional counselor for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. She’s worried about what will happen to her job – and the services provided to students like her daughter – if the district follows through with proposals to cut more than $5 million from its budget for the next fiscal year.
Among the proposals is a plan to cut nearly all of the district’s spending on mental health staff, whose positions had been funded through a federal program that helped schools address challenges related to the pandemic.
Avila, and other mental health staff in the district, said it’s “terrifying” to imagine what the cuts will mean both for them and the students who rely on their services. “It would be a great loss for the students.” she said.
Pajaro Valley Unified School District, like many school districts across the state, is facing difficult decisions this year thanks to a triple threat to their budgets: rising costs, lower state education spending because of declining enrollment and the end of pandemic-era federal funding.
The school-budget crisis in Santa Cruz County extends beyond the Pajaro Valley district. Live Oak School District also spent one-time funding on staffing. That funding, which began in 2020, ended with the start of this academic year. Last year, the district went through a tumultuous budget crisis and cut more than $1 million from its books.
This year, Superintendent Pat Sánchez said the district’s budget committee is looking at cutting even more than that to be fiscally solvent for the coming years, however it hasn’t yet released detailed plans for how to trim spending. “We have the committee working to identify about $2 million in impossible solutions for reduction,” he said. “But it’s painful.”
Anticipating the need for cuts, PVUSD assembled a team of community members and district staff earlier this year to craft recommendations on how to trim the budget.
This “sustainable budget team” focused on two main targets for the current academic year: cutting back programs funded by expiring federal pandemic aid, and trimming staff positions because of years of declining enrollment, which the district calls “right-sizing.”
When pandemic relief dollars flowed into PVUSD in 2020, the district turned to the community for guidance and heard about the need to invest in student mental health. It used part its share of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money to hire more staff. From a single mental health clinician at Renaissance High School, the staff grew to eight full-time clinicians, at a cost of nearly $1.7 million annually.
Most mental health staff work in high schools, where three partner with school resource officers at Watsonville, Aptos and Pajaro Valley campuses. One clinician serves the district’s middle school students exclusively, while another works full-time at the district’s wellness center, providing care to students of all ages.
The budget team outlined three possible options for the district’s board to consider this year, each cutting deeply into the mental health program. The plans would eliminate between $1.25 million and $1.5 million from the mental health clinician budget, effectively dismantling most of the program.
Social emotional counseling would lose between $750,000 and $1 million from its $2.9 million budget, threatening positions added during the pandemic. The district currently has 22 full-time social emotional counselors, compared to 12 in the 2019-2020 school year.
Each proposal also includes $750,000 in district office reductions and $1.3 million in cuts to elementary staff, due to declining enrollment. The district’s contract with Pajaro Valley Prevention & Student Assistance (PVPSA) faces reductions of either $500,000 or $1 million. PVPSA is a nonprofit that offers mental health services and health education in the Watsonville area and also partners with the district to provide services.
PVUSD Superintendent Heather Contreras said she sees this year as the first round of what will likely be a multi-year program of budget cuts.
The district will likely have to make about $5 million in additional cuts for the 2026-27 school year, she said, possibly by slashing spending on special education. It will also have to continue to address declining enrollment by finding ways to retain students. For example, she said the district could potentially expand a school’s grade offerings from transitional kindergarten to eighth grade, rather than serving only up to sixth grade.
Contreras said the district has started conversations with local third-party mental health service providers in the hope that they can continue providing support for students. “Now, as the funding source goes away, we have to figure out what to do,” she said.
And, she said, the district is not proposing to get rid of its entire mental health staff. “It’s not a reduction to complete zero,” she said, adding that the district will still have a number of social emotional counselors and mental health clinicians.
Matt Merrill, a mental health clinician with the district since 2019, told Lookout he’s “heartbroken” at the proposals to cut mental health staffing. He serves between 40 to 80 students annually depending on the year.
“We’ve saved lives, so it’s really scary to think about,” he said, adding he doesn’t think contracting for mental health support through local organizations will be enough to address the students’ needs.
PVUSD’s budget team plans to present its recommended cuts to the district’s governing board at its Jan 15 meeting. The board will likely discuss and vote on the cuts on Feb. 12. Once the board approves the budget cuts, the district’s human resources staff will figure out which employees will receive layoff notices. By state law, those notices must be delivered before March 15.
At Live Oak Unified School District, Sánchez said the final scenarios for budget cuts will be brought to the board at a meeting on either Jan. 15 or in early February in order to meet the March 15 layoff notification deadline.
He’s hoping that at least some budget reductions may turn out to be temporary. “Even when we make the cuts we might come back and restore those if we’re able to get to a better place before the end of the year.”
After three years of reporting on public safety in Iowa, Hillary joins Lookout Santa Cruz with a curious eye toward the county’s education beat. At the Iowa City Press-Citizen, she focused on how local… More by Hillary Ojeda
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