The May 15th deadline for mailing out final layoff notices to teachers has once again arrived. Until this week it was not clear just how many teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) would receive notices, and just what the response from the teachers’ union — the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) — would be. But thankfully, on Tuesday the SFUSD and UESF have reached what Superintendent Carlos Garcia is referring to as a conceptual agreement that if ratified by both the district and the union, would hold the number of layoffs to under 200.

Even that is a terrible loss, but it is also not unexpected in this budget environment. The news these days could not be much worse for the public education world, and the latest speculations about the Governor’s revised budget don’t offer much room for hope. The California Budget Project issued estimates of cuts for school districts before the revision that were grim enough, with the SFUSD projected at loosing $14,796,000 or $293 per student.

There are so many dimensions to this horrible situation it’s hard to know where to begin tackling it. The overall disastrous economy is of course the underlying problem, or looked at another way, an underlying symptom. As we continue to experience the real pain of the federal and state economic decline, the familiar financial layouts to bankers and the funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue unabated.

While the original stimulus monies from President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) prevented a portion of layoffs in education last year, they were one shot deals and didn’t create revenue streams required to maintain permanent positions. Now, at the last minute, when teaching jobs all across the country are on the chopping block because the economy did not recover in the intervening time, Senator Tom Harkin has put forward a bill known as the Keep Our Educators Working Act of 2010, which would provide $23 billion of emergency funding in fiscal year 2010, under the umbrella of the original ARRA act, to maintain teaching positions.

The act targets K-12 school districts as well as institutions of higher education. Governors will apply for money, which they will then reallocate it to their school districts and public colleges and universities. Restrictions on fund use are appropriately tight; money from this act can only be used to retain existing staff, hire new staff, or for professional development and training. An interesting section in this bill allows for the Secretary of Education to provide funding to states whose governors have failed to submit an appropriate application, offering some assurances to public schools in those states where governors don’t look kindly on the federal government.

The emergency funding will be more than welcome if it comes through, but is still not particularly reassuring. This disaster was easy to spot miles off, which makes one wonder where was the Department of Education all this time? Instead of crafting more variations of competitive grants of questionable value, Secretary Duncan would have been serving the students of this country, especially struggling students, much better by openly, publicly trying to tackle this problem of education financing head on. Simply put, students cannot learn if they don’t have teachers, or if so many are crammed into classrooms that there is no time to attend to their varying needs, or if the school year is shortened.

At this point, ensuring those basics would be a radical, transformative act on the part of the federal government. While Senator Harkin’s bill may keep our schools in tact this year, what will happen next year? The bottom line is that federal support for guaranteeing the simple maintenance of our public school system is unpredictable.

That’s the federal piece. Then we have the state piece, where matters are possibly worse. We all know by now that Governor Schwarzenegger has been draining K-12 funds at everyone opportunity, though he hasn’t always been successful. We also know that he has rejected or ignored the many possible streams of revenue that even in these rough times would have increased available public resources (see for instance, those enumerated by the California Federation of Teachers). The “assistance” he has given schools is to relax the requirements around the use of restricted funds and more sleight of hand reducing the budget, while pretending to protect it. All of this trickery and its consequences are well documented by many sources, from the California PTA to the California Budget Project to San Francisco’s local parent driven budget efforts, Funding Our Future.

And finally we have the local piece — the City and the district. Over the years the city of San Francisco has provided incredible support to its schools, from facilities bonds, to general fund support for arts, libraries, sports, music and more, to additional monies to increase teacher salaries, to the cash from the Rain Day fund to reduce the number of teacher layoffs. All of this support has come through this year as well, but the magnitude of the budget gap and the now reduced amount of rainy day funds and the other important social needs that the City must also fund, means that there is simply not enough to buffer the schools as has happened in past years.

At the district level, discussions around how to cut in the least painful way have been going on for months, but there has been no consensus between the district, the teachers union and the community regarding where the cuts should come from and how much they must be. That lack of consensus lead to the recent around the clock negotiations and a scheduled strike authorization vote by UESF, which hopefully will now be a vote on the tentative agreement instead.

A major contributing factor in the budget conflict, apart from the obvious lack of money, is the complexity of public school financing in California. The recent Public Policy Institute of California’s analysis of school finance in California echoed the Governor’s committee on Education Excellent stating that “…this system is so complex that the state cannot determine how revenues are distributed among school districts…” (p. 7)

The district has attempted to increase local knowledge about education finance by offering annual budget workshops and this year, by holding a series of community meetings on the budget, in partnership with parent organizations. This year, as more questions have been raised through these meetings, the district has provided more data and access, responding to questions by posting information on the budget page. For instance queries about the level of reserve funding and the amount spent on consultants have been partially answered, although it’s probable that those interested in this area will want more detail about how much is being spent on each category of consultant. Additionally, there will be a budget open office day, when people can schedule an appointment to meet with SFUSD Deputy Superintendent for Policy and Operations Myong Leigh to ask questions in a one on one setting about the budget.

These are great steps, but more needs to be done, a challenge in itself when staff hours are being trimmed back. But when the stakes are as high as they are now, all of us need to really understand the tradeoffs that are being made. Clearly this is something that can’t be done quickly and is not a finite effort — sadly, we know the odds of being back in this position next year are great For the community to be meaningfully informed and engaged in these painful decisions about budget cuts, we will need to sustain this collaborative effort to make our district’s budget comprehensible to the community, finding new and better ways to break out the finances and to continually add answers arising to community questions to the public record.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.