Point Reyes Light - October 28, 1999

Lagunitas School race skips past rancor

Restoring the financial health of Lagunitas School District while protecting the quality of its education is the challenge awaiting whichever two candidates get elected next week to the district's school board.

Running for two seats are incumbent trustee Richard Sloan, attorney David Picchi, consultant Jim Clapp, and parent Denise Bohman. Trustee Steve Charrier is stepping down after nine years on the board.

During the next four years, trustees can expect to make hard decisions affecting the Lagunitas School District's students, faculty, and administration. This year alone, the school board had to cut the district's budget by well over $300,000 - more than 10 percent of expenditures - to reverse a three-year pattern of deficit spending.

The district is just starting to feel the cuts, and more belt-tightening may be needed. Meanwhile, teacher salaries continue to languish among the lowest in Marin County. Furthermore, the district's parcel tax, which was approved by a razor-thin margin in 1997, expires after 2002.

Jim Clapp, 50, a Woodacre resident and lawyer, joined the school district's ad hoc budget committee this spring to help make budget recommendations to trustees. Clapp said both his current job as a financial analyst for the US Department of Education and former work with the California Culinary Academy give him experience in dealing with education dollars.

"I have experience in making hard budgetary decisions in a school setting," said Clapp. "I'd like to be in a position to make decisions, not just recommendations."

Among Clapp's recommendations are studying how to prevent declining enrollment from eating away district's revenues, finding where to cut administrative costs to come up with raises for teachers, and courting private philanthropic dollars in an "aggressive, coordinated" way.

A former Montessori parent whose son now attends San Domenico school in San Anselmo, Clapp estimates that the district needs to spend about $130,000 more a year to bring teachers' salaries to an "acceptable" level.

He concedes that the district may have to cut the number of personnel, which account for about 80 percent of its expenditures, to provide more competitive salaries. "That's the area where it is probably most critical to make decisions because that is where the money goes," he said.

Incumbent Richard Sloan, whose running in his sixth school board election, said raising teachers' salaries is a priority for him this time around. He said more budget cuts will likely be needed to accomplish that goal. "We have to reduce administrative costs significantly," he said. "We have to raise teachers' salaries."

Sloan, 64, has long supported the district's unorthodox offering of three different educational programs - Open Classroom, Montessori, and Academics and Enrichment - as a means of providing parents with the education of choice for their children.

"The community's right and ability to design education programs is sacred with me," he said, arguing that offering a variety of programs does not waste any money as long as it is spent on teachers and in the classrooms.

Sloan has one daughter in the Montessori program and two grown children that went through the Open Classroom. The Woodacre contractor has also lent his skills to help build the schools' playgrounds, lunch shelter, and footbridge across Larsen Creek.

He contends that the school district depends on active parent involvement and support, and he is unapologetic about his outspokenness. "The district has suffered from not having wide enough community involvement in its deliberations," he said. "There is an advantage in being controversial. It gets people to meetings."

Parent Denise Bohman, 38, has been attending school board meetings regularly for nearly four years. She chairs both the Academics and Enrichment parents' group and the scholastic book fair, formerly served as president of School Savers, and volunteered in the classrooms and on the playground.

As a "stay-at-home mom" with a daughter in third grade and a preschool son, Bohman said she offers a more comprehensive understanding of district issues, plus the time to discuss them with other Valley residents. "I really feel I'm familiar with the financial things that are going on, and also how it affects the programs and the people at the school," she said. "My availability is key."

Bohman said raising teacher's salaries is the most important issue facing the district, adding that she also expects the effects of recent budget cuts to truly hit home over the next year or so.

She said she looks at the district's financial constraints as an opportunity for reconsidering priorities. "It's going to be exciting," she said. "We've hit bottom. There's nowhere to go but up."

Attorney David Picchi, 52, has served on the district's ad hoc budget committee, hiring committee, and class size reduction committee. The Woodacre resident has a daughter in the fifth grade of the Montessori program, has coached in Little League, and been a softball umpire for the last two years.

As a trustee, Picchi said he would carefully deliberate how to make the best use of district resources with both short-term and long-term goals in mind. Among the challenges facing the school board, he said, is maintaining the best qualified faculty and keeping a lookout for gender bias and peer harassment in the district programs.

"Our goals must always be academic excellence, a strong sense of human decency, and self-respect," he said.

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