Dixon district cuts to take toll on students

The Dixon Unified School District is making deep reductions in programs and services to stop a trail of red ink that turned up after the former superintendent, Roberto Salinas, negotiated a retirement buyout and left the district.

Salinas now holds a prominent position, paid through a private grant, with the state Department of Education. He said Friday he did not learn Dixon schools were in financial distress until the day he signed his buyout agreement, Sept. 28, when his chief business official broke the bad news to him.

The chief business official, Susan Rinne, left the district several weeks later and now works as the interim director of fiscal services for Solano Community College. Rinne did not respond to a Bee request for an interview.

According to Solano County Office of Education officials, the budget mess came about because of numerous and sizable accounting errors.

The resulting cuts to Dixon schools have hit the close-knit Solano County community like a fiscal tornado, coming hard, fast and out of the blue and tearing into program after program.

No school, no student age group, no tier of employees has been spared.

Come this fall in elementary schools, children will no longer have computer technicians to help them navigate the Web, or library clerks to help them research and check out books. At the gleaming new high school, counseling hours will be cut by at least one quarter, and a dozen freshman coaches will lose their stipends. Districtwide, schools next fall will receive 12 fewer hours of care each day because 1 1/2 janitorial positions will be gone. By the end of next week, one of four elementary campuses will be slated for closure.

"It has been shocking," said Dan Rott, the principal at Tremont Elementary School in Dixon. Among his school's losses: two reading teachers, the library and computer technicians, two hours of daily secretarial and health technician time and 20 percent of the materials budget.

"We're closing a school because of incompetence," said Delynda Eldridge, a mother of two Dixon schoolchildren, during a parent meeting Tuesday evening to discuss which school should go. "Now our kids are paying the price."

Dixon braces for more cuts

Dixon is a small district, with about 3,900 students in grades kindergarten through 12th. In all, the system must strip $2.9 million from a $25 million budget. About $2.2 million of that is to make ends meet in the 2008-09 school year and stop a pattern of deficit spending, as well as to re-establish a now-empty reserve fund.

Like districts everywhere, Dixon also is bracing for about $700,000 in additional cuts because of the state budget crisis, said Leticia A. Allen, assistant superintendent of business and administrative services for the Solano County Office of Education.

The overall crisis in Dixon eclipses the widespread budget slicing going on in other districts. While those reductions may not all materialize if the state finds more cash for schools, the reductions in Dixon are a certainty, Allen said.

Allen and her boss, Dee Alarcón, Solano County's superintendent of schools, have been working since October to get a grip on Dixon's budget and lead the district toward "fiscal recovery."

"When you look at what we have had to clean up, it has been filled with many, many mistakes," said Alarcón, who serves as Dixon's acting superintendent.

Educators, parents and citizens of Dixon are infuriated, particularly because Salinas and Rinne have gone on to other well-paid positions in public education.

"I've spent three days now delivering layoff notices. It's lousy," said Brian Dolan, Dixon Unified's senior director of human resources. "A lot of people are asking, how does that happen that someone gets to move on to a job that looks as good or better after what has happened here?"

Under his buyout agreement, which The Bee acquired through a public records request, Salinas will be paid through June 30. At that time, he likely will be eligible for a pension through the state Public Employees' Retirement System; he said he does not know if he will apply for it.

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