SANTA PAULA : Schools to Seek Community Input

The Santa Paula Elementary School District board has approved spending as much as $72,000 on a program to encourage community members to help plan the district’s future.

The district faces an estimated $700,000 deficit in its $13-million budget next school year. However, funding for the program would come from money that is restricted by the state specifically for use in voluntary desegregation and could not be shifted to other areas to ease the budget crunch, Supt. David Philips said.

The district’s deficit is in the unrestricted portion of the budget, officials said.

The program, called Strategic Planning, would cost $62,000 to $72,000 for 1991-92, including about $55,000 for a coordinator and $17,000 for a planning session and an outside consultant, Philips said.

The costs after next year would be $4,000 for an annual review, he said.

The program, which would begin next school year, is a continuation of a voluntary integration plan started by the district three years ago. The plan was designed to balance the 72% Latino district so that each of its seven schools has about a 50% English-speaking population, and it also expanded the magnet-school program, Philips said.

The program, approved by board members last week, would continue those goals, Philips said. It must also be approved by state education officials.

The district will probably hire one of its own teachers for a year to oversee the work of about 300 community members on committees, Philips said. They would contribute to a document charting the district’s future for the next five to 10 years.

“It makes it so a lot of people are involved in decision making,” Philips said. “Right now it’s pretty centralized.”

Other districts nationwide that have implemented the program have boasted of higher enrollment and better test scores, officials said.