California district can't afford to use new $105M school

RIVERSIDE, Calif.  In a sign of just how deep economic and budget problems have grown in the nation's largest state, a gleaming new high school built at a cost of $105 million will sit unused for at least a year because education officials say they don't have money to operate it.

Hillcrest High School in Riverside was planned to relieve crowding at a nearby school and was financed with bonds approved by voters in 2007. But Wendell Tucker, superintendent of the Alvord Unified School District, says big cuts in state funding, the main source of money for local schools, have left the inland Southern California district without the means to hire administrators, teachers and other staff needed to open the campus when the school year starts this fall.

"When the California budget goes down and income in the state goes down, funding to K-through-12 education goes with it," Tucker says. "We made a number of budget adjustments. Right now, we simply are out of adjustments, and it's not feasible … to open this school."

While the soon-to-be completed school will be empty, 3,400 students attend nearby La Sierra High School, built to house fewer than half that number. Classes in the main subjects are packed with 35 to 37 students each, Tucker says. Although the new school would ease crowding, he says, it would cost $3 million to open and operate it for the coming academic year.

Some teachers could be moved from the district's other high school, but opening a new school would require hiring additional teachers, administrators and support staff, as well as the costs of running the gym and other facilities, Tucker says.

"I wanted to go to that school," says a disappointed Natalie Mercado, 14, who lives close by the new campus that remains fenced off. "I was really excited. … It looked really good."

State Education Superintendent Tom Torlakson says he understands the district's decision, calling it "a shame" and evidence of "draconian" choices schools must make because of a state budget crisis that has forced the layoffs of 30,000 teachers and led to furlough days in many school systems.

"Schools are having to make many decisions which are both unpopular and seemingly illogical," he adds. "They've really been pushed into a corner."

Alvord school board member Ben Johnson says the decision to keep the new school vacant was excruciating but that it came down to a choice between laying off more employees or keeping the new high school closed. "Choosing between people losing jobs and opening the school site, I couldn't in my mind justify one more person out of a job," he says.

California has cut $18 billion, one-third of state school funding, from money for kindergarten through high school over the past three years, Torlakson says. California was hit hard by the recession, and its unemployment rate, 11.7% in May, is the second highest in the nation after Nevada at 12.1%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. April was the first month California's jobless rate fell below 12% since August 2009.

Once a national model for education, California has slipped to near the bottom of states ranked on per-pupil spending. The California Budget Project, an organization that does budget and policy analysis, estimates that California's per-student funding has fallen from $8,464 in 2008 to $7,358 this year. It says that in 2010, California was 44th of the states in per-student spending.

Torlakson, a Democrat elected to the non-partisan post of head of the state Department of Education last fall, is supporting Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to help close the state's multibillion-dollar budget shortfall by extending $11billion in vehicle taxes and other levies due to expire this year. The state Legislature, deadlocked over budget issues, has ignored Brown's call for a statewide vote on his tax plan.

Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, a veteran Republican political strategist, says the vacant school is emblematic of a budget misery that continues despite a recent unforeseen rise in state tax collections.

"Unfortunately, it's probably a very accurate indicator of the state of our finances right now," he says of the school.

Schnur says the reduction shouldn't be a surprise to local school officials: "This was something people should have seen coming some time ago."

Tucker says that the decision to build the school was made in better economic times and that it would have been costly to back out of contracts and stop construction when the economy soured and the school district saw a $25 million reduction in its $130 million operating budget. He says that students and parents are disappointed but that most have been understanding.

Jo Loss, president of the California State PTA, says Hillcrest was the first new school to be mothballed by California's budget crisis. She calls it "a particularly poignant example" of declining public education.

"Parents are starting to see that their child is not getting the same education that perhaps their older child got," Loss says.

Tucker says the school district will spend $1million to maintain the new building, and run air conditioning and other systems to keep it from deteriorating. The library and ball fields, including an artificial turf football field, will be made available for community use.

There's no guarantee the school will open in fall 2012, either, Tucker says: "We'll look at it on a year-by-year basis."

"It's definitely a sign of the times," he says. "This is a real-life example of what the current budget situation has done to K-through-12 education.''