Despite protests and pleas, the Mill Valley School District board has agreed to a slate of layoffs to help close a $7.3 million budget deficit.

The trustees voted 4-0 Thursday, with board president Sharon Nakatani absent, to cut 40 full- and part-time classified workers, two certificated counselors and a counselor’s aide.

The board also approved cuts for one art teacher and one music teacher and to accept retirement buyout agreements from 27 employees.

The layoffs and buyouts, plus the elimination of transitional kindergarten classes, should trim the deficit by $6 million. Layoff warning notices will be issued by the state deadline on March 15.

“This is absolutely devastating,” said Stan Bransgrove, a representative of the Mill Valley chapter of the California State Employees Association.

“This is a direct hit on our chapter,” said Katie Wiltshire, the chapter’s treasurer. “It’s a deep reduction in force to half of our manpower.”

The employees include school library assistants, English language learner specialists, a health specialist, a custodian and others.

More than 425 parents and residents have signed an online petition to protest the cuts for counselors, said Vanessa Justice, a parent and petition organizer.

“Cutting approximately $400K from counseling will barely make a dent in the district’s budget issues, but will cause irreparable harm to students,” Justice told the board on Thursday. “These services cannot be replaced by teachers or interns.”

Andrea Cashman, one of the counselors to be laid off, said the district told staff it wants to return to its pre-pandemic level of two and a half counselors for five elementary schools.

“One clear fact is this,” Cashman said Friday. “Neither the board nor the superintendent ever spoke to, visited or observed either of the two counselors that were let go.”

Art teacher Nancy Bloch said the program will suffer as the remaining teachers struggle to cover an increased workload.

“This will leave inadequate time to prepare our projects and materials for classes that can span six grade levels on any given day,” she said.

Superintendent Elizabeth Kaufman, who was in tears at one point, said that while the layoffs were “heartbreaking,” the district had to adhere to the community’s top priority of maintaining small class sizes and a high level of instruction.

Jobs not immediately supporting that priority had to go, no matter how valuable, Kaufman said.

In particular, she said, the cuts in classified employees will hit hard because “our staff could not do our work without the people behind us, doing their work.”

Trustee Eli Abdoli agreed, adding that while she wishes the district could postpone the layoffs, “if we don’t act today, we’ll go to 10.7% in budget reserves.”

The district, which was on track to exhaust its reserves by June 30, 2027, is committed to maintaining about eight to 10 times the minimum state level of 3% reserves.

‘We have 450 less students than we did pre-COVID,” Abdoli said. “These cuts should have happened much earlier.”

The district’s budget crisis stems from the loss of $6.2 million in pandemic relief funds last September.

Also, the district sustained a $2.5 million mistake the prior budget director made in reporting a two-year teachers contract to the Marin County Office of Education in 2023. It offered 14% in raises for 2023-24 and 2024-2025.

The reporting form did not show the impact of the raises over the full three-year reporting cycle. Instead, it artificially inflated the reserves, showing that the district budget was well able to absorb the raises, when it was not.

The district blames the county for not catching the mistake. The county office says its reporting form is a basic tool for the district to demonstrate it has an adequate budget for a teacher’s contract. It is not set up to spark an investigation, the county has stated.

Trustee Michele Crncich Hodge said such school district budget crises “are not necessarily new in Marin County. They’ve just never happened here before.”