CLASS SIZES TO STAY LOW IN LANCASTER SCHOOL LAYOFFS TO BE AVOIDED.

Byline: Marci Wormser Staff Writer

LANCASTER - When most Antelope Valley school districts are nearly drowning in a sea of financial woes, Lancaster School District trustees believe they will stay afloat without laying off employees or increasing class sizes.

Board members say that careful fiscal planning and conservative spending over the past few years have been the district's lifeboat.

``We saw it coming,'' said board member Keith Giles. ``Our (financial state) is bad but not as bad as it could be.''

No district employees have received layoff notices, and trustees are confident they can make necessary budget cuts without needing to increase student-teacher ratios to more than 20-to-1, Giles said.

``We're trying to (make cuts) as far away from the classroom as possible,'' he said.

The superintendent's budget advisory committee has been compiling lists of possible program cuts, but the budget won't be drafted until late May.

School administrators are waiting apprehensively for the next state budget to be adopted and signed before the full extent of the cuts is realized.

``We're still waiting in the wings to find out what happens in the budget before we decide what cuts to make,'' Giles said.

Still, Giles said, ``we're not talking about laying off any teachers.''

In addition to keeping their jobs, Lancaster district teachers will be receiving a 1 percent pay raise during the 2003-04 school year, Giles said. The teachers' last raise was 8 percent in the 1999-2000 school year.

Other local districts this year are preparing for painful cuts.

In the Palmdale School District, trustees voted to increase class sizes and lay off 115 teachers, 59 classified or nonteaching employees and 10 assistant principals, effective June 30.

Westside School District trustees voted to lay off 43 teachers. Southern Kern Unified School District trustees voted to lay off 22 teachers.

Eastside Union School District will eliminate elementary school music programs, lay off elementary school librarians and make third-grade classes larger.

Giles said he credits Superintendent Steve Gocke's financial management for the Lancaster district's less-bleak fiscal status.

Anticipating state budget crises, Lancaster officials put a freeze on hiring and decided not to fill administrative vacancies ``for quite a while,'' Giles said.

Lancaster jobs that have not been filled include the one vacated a year ago when Ned McNabb resigned as superintendent of business services to become the superintendent of Wilsona School District in Lake Los Angeles.

Leaving three or four administrative jobs vacant has saved the district several hundred thousand dollars, Giles said.

In addition, the district will refrain from hiring some teaching assistants to further trim the budget, Giles said.