Making Reading, Writing and Recession Work Together

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In California, school are cutting back on nurses, librarians and electricity — turning off the lights in many rooms and duct-taping over the switches

Michael Tnasuttimonkol for TIME

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Terry Grier, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, says his district needs a cash influx now. "There are schools in our district that don't even have nurses on certain days," says Grier, whose district includes Hage Elementary School and its shuttered stacks. "If a kid skins his elbow, a teacher has to take time out of her lesson to dust him off, clean him up and put on a Band-Aid."

California isn't the only state grappling with steep K-12 budget cuts. In Florida, officials in overcrowded school districts are bracing themselves for likely staff cuts. Connecticut's board of education adopted a budget resolution in December that included an overall 10% reduction — a move that some fear means that pink slips for teachers are inevitable. "The biggest line items in most school budgets are staff and benefits," says Bob Brewer, an education consultant in East Hartford, Conn. "No district can absorb those kinds of hits without trimming some of those big-ticket items." (See pictures of politically engaged teens.)

Even oil- and gas-rich states are panicking. In Alaska, for instance, sinking oil prices have some state legislators scrambling to lock in education budgets for the next few years as the state prepares to dip into its savings to cover a shortfall of approximately $1.65 billion this year and up to $3 billion next year. In Montana, which earned big bucks last year from its natural resources, education is funded primarily through property taxes, and many fear that the closing of mines and aluminum plants could trigger a mass exodus and redistribute the tax base. "It doesn't look good," says Eric Feaver, who heads the MEA-MFT, a union of teachers and state employees. "People around here are starting to ask themselves what will happen if people leave."

Where will those families go? And whose school districts can afford to absorb their children? In California, school officials are expecting to receive upwards of $8 billion over two years from the federal stimulus. While this money would enable districts to address some of their most pressing needs, John Mockler, an education-funding specialist in Sacramento, says, "It's not a panacea." In the long term, Mockler says, states need to come up with new funding sources to support classroom instruction and let teachers do what they were hired to do — teach.

In the meantime, some school-district administrators have come up with creative solutions. Superintendent Jerry Vaughn of the Floydada Independent School District in Texas — which has 900 or so students — says he is working toward a partnership with a local wind-power company that would pay for a laptop for every kid in grades 6 through 12. At the fast-growing Forsyth County Schools District in Cumming, Ga., Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer, recently opted to use free open-source software instead of purchasing expensive software licenses from vendors like Microsoft. Mitchell says the decision will save $1.1 million over three years. "We sat back and recognized the money we needed simply wasn't going to materialize out of thin air," he says.

Back in San Diego, at Hage Elementary, teachers desperate for help in the school library are recruiting parent volunteers to staff the facility a few days each week. Juli Finney, president of the school's Parent-Teacher Association, admits that while this solution isn't ideal, it is precisely the kind of effort she and other parents must make to ensure that state budget cuts don't deny their children the chance to experience the thousands of books that are now quite literally behind closed doors. "Technically, the PTA is supposed to put icing on the cake and not provide the cake itself," she says. But when times are tough, some cake is better than no cake at all.

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