Nobody is immune to the pain of such a downturn, and the Los Gatos­Saratoga Union High School District is no exception. The district is presently facing a $1.6 million deficit that it must eliminate. Currently, 43 percent of that $1.6 million deficit—$688,000—is going to come at the expense of teachers: $528,000 in teacher salaries and another $160,000 in proposed cuts to their health benefits.

But the worst is yet to come. The above scenario is based on a $1.6 million deficit. Word on the street is that basic aid districts such as ours are going to suffer the loss of the $120 per average daily attendance (ADA), as well as the loss of 2.1 percent of basic aid revenues, which will be returned to the state. This additional $700,000 of lost revenue turns our $1.6 million deficit into a $2.3 million shortfall.

Come March 15, all first- and second-year teachers at Saratoga and Los Gatos high schools are going to receive layoff notices. At Saratoga, we currently have an extraordinarily dedicated teaching staff committed to delivering only the highest quality education to the children of this community. Los Gatos High is currently ranked in the top 1 percent of 25,000 public high schools in this country. (Saratoga is ranked 59th out of 25,000.)

This high school district is to secondary education what the NBA is to hoops or the NFL to football. These new teachers who came to Saratoga or Los Gatos didn't come for the stock options or the high salaries—they came here to teach, and we hired the very best folks who applied for the job.

The teachers at Saratoga and Los Gatos (and I'm assuming the parents of our students) want to keep classroom sizes and current staffing levels where they are; we don't want our newly built, newly remodeled classroom facilities packed like sardine tins full of students.

These new teachers who are going to receive layoff notices are the youngest, most vibrant folks we've got. They are the folks who are the most up-to-date on the latest developments in their fields. To lay these people off to balance the district's budget is to simply devour the seedcorn of our instructional staff and greatly diminish our ability to educate kids in a way that is exciting, inspiring and relevant.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But treating teachers as cuttable expenses is a short-term strategy based on the extraction of value, not a long-term solution based on the creation of value. (And who among us is in favor of trying to solve the current budget crisis by replacing teacher medical benefits with managed health plans that would embarrass a Third World bus company?)

Teachers do not generate a profit—that's not what they do. Teachers don't produce anything that can be found on the supermarket shelf or on the showroom floor. But for every student we send to college, we reap countless dollars in return in the way of human capital: viable, productive human beings with greatly increased lifetime earning potential.

It is education that is the key to economic success in our society today—education and new information and advances in technology are what drive new economic growth—not the building of more prisons at the expense of fewer teachers and larger class sizes. High-quality, high-impact teachers do influence the reputations of their schools, and the reputations of those schools do affect property values.

This is a truly amazing high school district that, as a matter of routine, sends its graduates off to the Ivy League and UC schools in droves each and every year. My great fear is that a lot of the value that has been created over the last 10 years in this district is about to be destroyed by a $2 million shortfall in tax revenue.

It is my sincere hope that anyone who lives within district boundaries, regardless of whether their child is attending public or private school—or anyone who is simply concerned about the value of their home and property—will start considering some possible solutions to this problem, or, in the absence of that, at least ponder the consequences and ramifications of not resolving the problem.

Todd Dwyer teaches economics at Saratoga High School. He has been a sitting member of the Los Gatos­Saratoga Union High School District Budget Advisory Committee for three years and a District Teachers Association representative for four years.