BY AMELIA BISCARDI
Daily Post Staff Writer
A Las Lomitas Elementary School District board member didn’t remember cutting summer school from the budget despite the cut being announced to district families.
“It was posted in the district newsletter that it (summer school) had been cut, and I couldn’t recall what we had actually decided,” board member Kimberly Legg said at the board’s March 5 meeting.
The board was presented with a series of cuts on Feb. 12 by Interim Superintendent Valerie Park, and summer school was included in the list. While the district had already made $3.2 million in cuts, Chief Business Officer Mei Chan said during that meeting, more cuts would be needed in the long run as the district has an $8.3 million hole in its budget. No vote occurred during that discussion, but the board gave Chan a green light.
But Legg’s confusion led the board to vote 3-2 on March 5 to keep summer school canceled. Board members Paige Winikoff, Jason Morimoto and Heather Hopkins voted to uphold the cancellation. Legg and Gautam Nadella voted to re-open summer school.
“I feel uncomfortable saying we need to scrap it entirely,” Nadella said.
Morimoto said he could not support summer school with the district’s current financial situation.
Concerned parent
Parent Elizabeth DiRenzo said summer school helps with her son’s stability and the cancellation was “abrupt” and disruptive for many families.
Her son has an Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, and has attended summer school two years in a row.
“I cannot tell you how much this has benefited him for the past two years,” DiRenzo said. “For students with special needs, summer school is not just an extra opportunity, it is truly essential.” Faced with a financial deficit, the school board discussed ideas such as having some parents pay for schools or running summer camps.
Park said if the district had time, some of the board’s ideas could have worked, but there isn’t enough time to hire employees to cover summer school.
Financial struggles
The school district has been overwhelmed with financial concerns, beginning with a three-day strike in October because the teacher’s union and district couldn’t reach a contract.
Teachers received a 7% retroactive raise for last school year, a 5% raise for this school year and a 4% raise for next school year, bringing average teacher pay to $156,383.
Moving forward with the budget, Legg said she wants to find different ways to allocate funds, such as charging for the yearbook instead of cutting services like summer school.
“It’s not a holistic way of looking at things,” Legg said. “We just picked this one thing quickly, and I guess we made a decision last time, whatever we did, and now that’s done, and we haven’t looked (to cut) anything else.
The Las Lomitas Elementary School District includes two schools — La Entrada Middle School in Menlo Park and Las Lomitas Elementary in Atherton — and had 1,161 students in 2023-24.
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