Are You Closing Pine School?

Thank you for the question. I have been asked this a lot lately. At this time, we have no plans to close Pine School.

Pine School is currently a K-8 School in the District. Like the District as a whole, its enrollment is down again this year, with about 180 or so students attending Pine, with 11 teachers, a custodian, office staff, principal and library clerk.

Pine School has a long, rich history in the District, having been established in 1948. Many of our long-time Holtville residents attended Pine as have their children and now their grandchildren. I enjoy my visits to Pine as the students are well-motivated and the teachers are extremely dedicated to their students and the school.

That being said, we will be making a lot of very difficult decisions about the future of all of our schools in the coming months. The State of California is having an EXTREMELY difficult budget year, with statewide deficits of over $42 Billion. This will have a huge effect on school funding this year and even more so in the next 3-5 years. Estimates on what that statewide funding for the future will have on Holtville range anywhere from a reduction of $350,000 to $1.5 million in the next year.

Unfortunately, due to the depths of the cuts, and the uncertainty of the how large the deficits will be in the next few years, we cannot make any concrete promises about the future of any of our programs. Hopefully the legislature will quickly pass a budget for the remainder of this year and next year that spares schools the type of cuts that will require us to look deeper at all of our program options.

My priority, as well as that of the school board, is to provide the highest level of education possible, districtwide. That is what we are doing now, and that's what we plan to continue doing, no matter what challenges the state budget brings us.

I appreciate the question!