At every level of education in Long Beach, the challenge remains the same — continue to provide high-quality education, and do it with less money.

No student in Long Beach, or in the state for that matter, will escape the impact of state-level budget cuts. Those attending community college or four-year universities will pay more and still have fewer options, while K-12 students will be attending schools with less money to spend.

Leaders at all three levels of education in Long Beach say they can provide more quality education with less — this year. That could change next year if the state budget continues its freefall, the education leaders say.

Because of some conservative planning in the last couple of years, schools here are in better shape to weather the budget storm than most. There have been no layoffs at the Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College or California State University, Long Beach, in preparation for the coming school year. Enrollments will remain level or increase at all three levels, and classes will remain at about the same size.

Budget challenges are different at the three levels of education, but the priority is the same, all the leaders said. Chris Steinhauser, LBUSD superintendent, summed it up:

“We’re actually doing more with less,” he said. “We’re pulling together, and making sure our students can get the best education they possibly can.”

That “best education” has been attracting attention. LBUSD is a finalist for the second straight year for the Broad Prize as the best school district in the country, and CSULB is the “hot campus” in the 23-campus California State University system, becoming the largest and sifting through more than 48,000 applications to pick the 9,300 freshmen starting this fall. Add the two-campus Long Beach City College and the three systems have partnered into a “seamless education” model that has been copied around the country.

“We can’t let a tight budget slow our momentum down,” CSULB President Robert Maxson said. “I challenge our faculty every time we meet to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have to convince people that the quality of education isn’t going to suffer, and we have to make sure it doesn’t.”

Kindergarten To High School

The Long Beach Unified School District is the third largest in the state. As such, it is being hit harder than most in what was supposed to be a proportional cut in primary and secondary education in California.

Cuts for LBUSD began last year. Steinhauser said that the district leadership actually began preparing for tough budget times two years ago, under the leadership of Steinhauser’s former boss, Carl Cohn.

“From March of 2001 to June of 2002, we cut $9.5 million,” Steinhauser said. “Then we went down $17 million in the 2002-2003 school year, and we’re down another $19 million this school year.Š In the central office alone, we’ve cut 45% in the last three years. That’s $7.1 million right there.”

Long Beach’s general fund budget is about $650 million, with another $250 million budgeted for special projects. But the district serves nearly 100,000 students, and the impact of the estimated $7 million cut in state support this fall (in addition to a mid-year cut absorbed in January) is significant. That’s particularly true when costs such as health benefits skyrocket (up $10 million in the last year).

“We’re looking at a 1.2% basic reduction,” Steinhauser said. “And everything costs more than it did in the past. But we have to put the needs of the kids first. We’re going to make sure that as many kids as want to go to college in Long Beach will be ready to go when they leave here.”

Keeping cuts away from the classroom has meant some creative savings. In addition to a hiring freeze, the district has saved about $500,000 by instituting an energy-saving program — “turning out the lights,” Steinhauser said — and another $500,000 with an new prescription benefits program contract with Walgreen’s. A summer recreation program partially financed by the city (which is cutting its own budget next year) will be reduced by a week, down to five weeks next year.

Efforts such as those have paid off to make room for more intervention for at-risk students, Steinhauser said, with daily reading classes and “double-dose mathematics” for students in trouble there. There will be additional art classes as well. The district actually will hire 350 teachers before school starts this fall, he said.

But there is little left to cut if the budget situation continues, Steinhauser warns.

“The scary part now is how to contain costs,” he said. “We’re doing things about as efficiently as we can. We have to contain costs, because I fear next year is going to be worse. If it is, we’re going to have to make some hard decisions.

“I think we have to be very careful when we talk about reducing services to our youth. When we do, we may be creating a problem down the road. We have to be careful not to have a knee-jerk reaction. Fixing this is a multi-year process.”

Higher Education

While the cuts to public K-12 education seem severe, colleges have taken a bigger hit. Students at every level of public higher education will pay more this year and the institutions they attend will still have less money to spend educating them.

At the community college level, tuition is increasing by almost two-thirds, from $11 a credit hour to $18 a credit hour. With an average semester class load of 15 credits, that is an increase of $210 a year.

That’s still less than half the increase being seen by students in the California State University, where resident undergraduates will pay $2,046 in basic tuition and fees, up $474. That is on top of a 10% increase last January.

The even more expensive University of California system increased tuition proportionately. There are no UC campuses in Long Beach.

But, according to Maxson at CSULB and Eloy Oakley, vice president of administrative services at LBCC, the increased tuition only softens the blow. Tuition goes directly to the state, and the amount of money sent back to the campuses — which campus population determines — is less than what has been raised.

“For us, the budget now is an improvement from what it looked like in January,” Oakley said. “But it reduces our revenue by 15%. We will have to scale back.”

At CSULB, healthy reserves will soften the blow this year, Maxson said. Because Long Beach is the biggest campus in the system, it will see the biggest cuts. But there won’t be any complaining, at least publicly, he added.

“We’ll be able to use reserves this year to keep classes up and still maintain a healthy reserve,” Maxson said. “Next year will be the hardest for us. But we’re all in this together. All of the campuses are going through it, and most of the states are going through it.”

Community colleges remain a viable, affordable option for higher education and vocational education, Oakley said. Long Beach’s two campuses hosted about 30,000 students last year, and enrollment continues to grow.

“We don’t expect our enrollment to drop, but that our growth will slow,” Oakley said. “We have been growing by 4% or 5% a year, and now we expect it to be 2% or 3%. We may see some push because of the higher tuition at Cal State, with some people deciding to start at the community college level.”

There has been a “semi-freeze” on hiring at LBCC, particularly in administrative staff and economic development programs where the college partners with the city or county to provide job training at reduced cost. Equipment purchases, which will have to come out of the general fund this year, will be delayed.

Classes students need to advance still will be offered. But the schedule may not be as convenient as it used to be.

“We’ll be scaling back on the ‘convenience factor’ of some of the large classes, like English,” Oakley said. “All of the general education classes will still be offered, but maybe not as many or at as convenient a time.”

That same phenomenon will be seen at CSULB, Maxson said. The university must limit the number of students it enrolls when it has less money to make sure those students get the classes they need.

“The worst thing we could do is to admit a student, promise him or her an education, then not have the classes they need,” Maxson said. “That’s not going to happen. They might have to take a Friday class or a night class, but they will be able to find the class they need.”

Maxson said enrollment this fall will stay about the same as last year, with between 9,300 and 9,500 new students on a campus of more than 35,000. But the quality of education continues to improve, he contended.

“There will be 380 California valedictorians on campus this fall,” Maxson said. “We have hired 66 new professors, and they’re from all across the nation — the best schools. There’s more to hiring quality than salaries. You have to convince people it is an exciting place to be, to work. We’re doing that.”

Building Continues

While operational money is being chopped by the state at all levels of education, Long Beach school systems’ building coffers are full. Voters approved a $295 million capital construction bond issue for LBUSD in 1999 and a $176 million bond issue for LBCC last year.

CSULB gets its capital improvement money through the California State University system, and will open a new science building this year. That project pretty much completes major construction, Maxson said, although efforts have begun to find ways to build new dormitories on campus.

“There is more demand for dorms than we have capacity,” Maxson said. “A few years ago, we were an Orange County, LA school. But that’s not the case anymore. We’d love to get more housing on campus, and I’m also working on a way to have a Greek (fraternity and sorority) housing area as well. It will be a few years, though.”

When the school district passed its bond issues, plans called for at least 10 new schools. This year’s major project is the new elementary school going up at Broadway and Golden. The still unnamed school will house about 800 students, and is part of a first-of-its-kind facility sharing agreement with the city. The school will use part of Cesar Chavez Park as its playground during the day, and the city will use the school’s gymnasium as a recreation facility during non-school hours.

The Broadway and Golden school is the second completely new school to be built since the bond issue was approved (the other is the K through 8 Colin Powell Academy). Much of Long Beach’s newest high school campus downtown, Cabrillo, was built with the bond funds, as well.

Long Beach City College just finished celebrating its 75th anniversary, and many of the buildings on its two campuses date back to the 1950s. Because the district is self-governed, it was able to seek and pass a bond issue to pay for renovation and replacement of those buildings.

Construction at both the school district and the community college district is expected to stretch into the next decade. LBUSD has secured two more sites for schools and is looking for more property.

LBCC’s Oakley seemed to sum the situation up for all the schools.

“We’ll be fine in terms of facilities,” he said. “The trick is operating them at capacity. The reduction in revenue is a problem, but the even bigger problem is the unpredictability of the situation and how it affects our ability to plan.

“The sooner the legislature deals with the deficit, the better it is for us. All of us.”