PaliHi Must Still Cut $287,000

Meeting for nearly five hours Tuesday night, the Palisades Charter High School board unanimously agreed to direct the administration to cut an additional $287,000 and produce an operating budget of $23.3 million in the 2011-12 school year.   Chief Business Officer Greg Wood anticipates that PaliHi will receive $23.3 million from federal, state and local revenues in 2011-12, compared to the $23.6 million the school received in 2010-11.   The majority of funding comes from the state, so Wood based his budget projections on Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed state budget, released last month. The state legislature still needs to approve Brown’s budget this summer.   ’For most of the year, the budget predictions were very dire, so we were happy when we got to our all-day budget meeting on May 31 [at Aldersgate Retreat Center] that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it is still not super,’ said Robert King, chair of PaliHi’s Budget and Finance Committee, which creates the budget for the board to approve every year.   King explained that the committee examined all the departments to find savings, but came up $263,000 shy of balancing the budget.   On Tuesday, the board agreed to freeze field trips for an estimated savings of $20,000 and to ask Sodexo, which manages the cafeteria, to hire nine of the 10 cafeteria employees for a savings to the school of about $62,000. These employees are currently employed by the school and eight of them receive health benefits.   Chad Williams, district manager for Sodexo in Southern California, assured the board that all nine employees would keep their jobs and the same hours. The employees will have to pay more for their health benefits, but will receive a 3 percent raise to compensate.   The board also decided to set aside an additional $45,000 for transportation, $21,000 for administrative salaries (budgeted at $870,000) and $40,000 to cover the cost of a coordinator to work with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges on accreditation, bringing the deficit to $287,000.   The board directed PaliHi’s administration to negotiate with the teacher and classified unions to reduce that deficit.   After the negotiations are done, ‘we are asking the administration to recommend to the board how to take the rest of that money out of the budget,’ board member Naomi Norwood said.