UNC School of the Arts is grappling with state cuts of $2.97 million, or 10.8 percent of its budget, which will likely mean layoffs and substantial cuts in operations, school officials said Tuesday.
"We're facing a significant cut," Charles Lucas, the chairman of UNCSA's board of trustees, said at a board meeting. "The administration is doing the best they can to deal with it in an appropriate way. It is going to be very difficult and it is going to cause some pain, no doubt."
The cut represents the school's share of the $414 million reduction to the 2011-2012 budget for the UNC system. How it will affect UNCSA's operations likely won't be known for another week or two while the school's leadership considers a range of scenarios.
"While preserving the jobs of existing employees is a top priority, it is inevitable that some filled and several vacant positions will be lost across the campus, and operating budgets will be cut," John Mauceri, UNCSA's chancellor, wrote in a July 8 letter to the UNCSA community. "To what extent, we are still in the process of determining."
UNCSA appears to have come close to experiencing no cuts at all.
"We were heartened that the legislature passed an exemption from any cuts to both UNCSA and UNC-Asheville in the final budget," Mauceri wrote in a July 6 letter to the campus. "However, the exemption was removed in the closing hours of the legislative session."
After that, UNCSA was initially looking at a cut of $3.2 million, or 11.6 percent. The UNC Board of Governors then approved an amendment to decrease this reduction by $226,948, giving the school a break because it does not receive tuition for its in-state high school students, Mauceri wrote.
Mauceri stressed that "our first obligation is to protect the educational experience of our students."
Lucas said that he has every confidence that the school's leadership "will come up with the best possible solution to a difficult problem."
One solution that has been discussed is the closing of the UNCSA School of Filmmaking. In November, school officials said they would consider this option if the school were forced to cut its budget by 10 percent. Spokeswoman Marla Carpenter said Tuesday that the closing of the film school had not been taken off the table.
Jordan Kerner, the dean of the School of Filmmaking, said the cuts facing UNCSA would be "devastating to our program." But he also said he has heard comments of support from legislators, who did not want to cut the film school completely.
"It is an economic engine," he said. "We can't cut the film school out."
Kerner said that 85 percent of the film school's budget goes to salaries. The rest underwrites such expenses as film stock. If that part of the budget were cut, "we couldn't even pay for the films," he said. "We would be a film school without films."
Such a scenario would "inhibit the growth of the film industry in this state," Kerner said.
"I'm an honorable person, and if I have to captain a sinking ship, I'll captain it and go down with it, but if it's simply captaining a mediocre ship that has no relevance, I'm not going to captain it," Kerner said. "They could find someone else to do it."
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