Community Commentary:

In the recent Mailbag piece by Mike Bailey (“Do we need three school districts?” April 1) there were some unfair comparisons as well as erroneous statements concerning administration staffing of the three districts referenced. At this time, I am not taking a stand for or against his opinion that districts should unify, but I feel I must prevent misinformation from spreading.

Bailey indicated that the Huntington Beach City School District has, in addition to a superintendent, three assistant superintendents and a “full staff.” While the number of assistant superintendents is true, the district most certainly does not have a full staff. Many of the support staff personnel and departments were cut over the years due to the ongoing underfunding and outright cuts by the state. The work did not disappear, of course, so it fell to the assistant superintendents — all of whom work at least 50 hours a week and often more — and their remaining staff. We do, however, have three directors and one supervisor to help handle some of the departments.

It must also be stated, if we are talking about the administration costs, that we were able to take monetary advantage of our superintendent retiring last year and were able to contract for an interim position at a lesser cost to the district. This is in no way meant as a criticism to other districts as to how they choose to staff their district offices. Each district is unique and must decide based on its needs.

However, the listings of the other schools were also misrepresented. Bailey states that the Ocean View School District has a superintendent and only one assistant superintendent. While that is technically true, it also has a deputy superintendent, 10 directors, two coordinators and, in addition, two supervisors for departments that the City School District cut out of its budget long ago: reprographics and communications.

It is really comparing apples to oranges to pit a high school district’s staff numbers against an elementary district’s, because the programs and needs are completely different. But again, the Huntington Beach Union High School District administration numbers listed by Bailey are misleading. In addition to the superintendent, he does correctly list the high school district as having two assistant superintendents (I believe one of those has been vacant but is being filled again). However, the district also has two chief business officers, one chief financial officer, one executive director, six directors and one coordinator.

I don’t have inside information here. All of the information that I am providing is readily available on each district’s website, and with ongoing reductions, some of these positions could be changing or disappearing in the upcoming year, if they haven’t already.

In the City School District, we have chosen so far to keep the certificated experts rather than dole out those responsibilities to increased lesser positions, and I think that decision is one factor that helps give our schools the reputation of excellence that they continue to enjoy. Having the higher-tiered professionals has allowed us the expertise to more proficiently keep on top of curriculum, teacher training, student evaluation, mandated data gathering and reporting, and to garner many grants and other funding sources, which has helped some of our departments and programs pay for themselves.

While it is true that, with even more cuts coming from Sacramento, we will be forced to increase our class sizes, which does mean loss of teacher jobs, that must be weighed against the fact that we have approved almost 500 interdistrict transfers (students from other school districts choosing to come to ours) for the coming school year. This helps to keep jobs and increase our average daily attendance allotment from the state, as meager as it is per student. So in a time when most districts are facing declining enrollment, ours has actually been increasing.

I also feel obliged to point out that, compared to national standards, our schools are severely understaffed in the area of administration. At the district office level, the national average is one administrator for every 761 students, while in our state it is one to 2,366. A very large difference. No wonder California has dropped from one of the top five states in excellence in education to near bottom over the last few decades. Despite what critics say, we are most certainly not top-heavy in administration in this state. And having sufficient administrators providing quality oversight and implementation has a positive impact on the classroom. It does not take away.

We have gone beyond the point of keeping the cuts out of the classrooms. I suspect that trying to unify our local districts will not help the situation, but we voters insisting to our legislators that education must be a priority will help, and that is where we should all concentrate our immediate efforts.

ROSEMARY SAYLOR is a board member for the Huntington Beach City School District.