Schools leaders recommend cuts

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District may tighten its operations in the near future, as administrators have recommended streamlining programs and freeing money to pay for salaries and other costs.

On Tuesday, administrators released a report on 36 Newport-Mesa district programs — including after-school tutoring, preschool, counseling and intervention for troubled students — that analyzed whether they were cost-effective and provided enough benefits for students. The review team, led by assistant superintendents and other district leaders, suggested cutting or trimming some programs and obtaining state funding to pay for others.

If the district enacted every change outlined in the report, it would free $658,857 in general funds and $416,891 in state categorical funds. Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard said it was unlikely that the district would make all the changes, but predicted that administrators would follow through on a few of them.

“I think overall it’s been very beneficial for the board and the district administration to review those programs,” Hubbard said.

The report also recommended transferring some district-run programs to individual school sites — which Hubbard said was part of a larger movement in the district to simplify the chain of command. A number of administrators, he said, would be retiring in the coming years, and the district does not plan to fill all of their positions.

“School districts are very bureaucratic, and one of the goals of this program is to reduce the amount of bureaucracy in Newport-Mesa,” Hubbard said.

Hubbard and other administrators met with the school board in a study session Tuesday to discuss the first half of the report; a follow-up session is planned for next week. The report recommended making changes on a few programs but praised the majority of them, including the recently installed Early College High School and the Project ASK intervention for at-risk students.

According to district figures, the latter program has cut truancies by almost a third in the district and provided classes for more than 600 parents — although Chuck Hinman, the assistant superintendent of secondary education, said numbers told only part of the story.

“We don’t know what path a kid would have taken,” Hinman said. “We’ll never know that.”

Other programs received lower marks. Administrators recommended continuing Family Friendly Schools, a program launched two years ago to make schools more welcoming to visitors, but ceasing to pay $40,000 every year for a consultant to help run it. The report also suggested cutting the Alternative Chance at Education program, in which students work with county officials to make up units, and replacing it with individual programs at school sites.

Student services director Mike Murphy, who oversees the program, liked the idea.

“We’d be in better control of curriculum, hours, standards that are met,” Murphy said. “We’d have a better handle on things, basically.”