In his revised budget, Gov. Schwarzenegger is not suggesting any more cuts to K-12 schools than he proposed in January.

But that should provide little comfort or confidence to school districts. They’ll likely spend the summer watching a stalemate in Sacramento while worrying whether the school budgets they’ll set  in June, using the governor’s revised state budget in May, will turn out to be too high. There’s a good chance they will be ­– even with the big spending cuts they’ll already include.

There are ugly choice out there.  If the Legislature agrees to Schwarzenegger’s plan to eliminate CalWORKS, the state’s primary welfare program, providing day care and living expenses for a million children, and cut state-subsidized child care for 142,000 children,  then the state’s most vulnerable children will be thrown into chaos. Schools will be bear the brunt of their insecurity in their lives. But if Democrats fight those cuts, then school districts had better watch their flanks.

As the California School Boards Association noted in its budget analysis, “If the Republicans and Governor successfully hold the line on raising taxes, and the Democrats successfully hold the line on cuts to CalWORKS and other social programs, then the only solution is to suspend Proposition 98 and reduce K-14 funding.”

The cut in child care funding would come out of Proposition 98, the chief source of revenue for K-12 schools and community colleges, which would be permanently adjusted downward. This would be on top of the $2.4 billion that Schwarzenegger wants to cut K-12 schools by reneging on past unfunded obligations and manipulating revenues from the gas tax so that it appears that the Prop 98 revenue is lower than it would otherwise be. For 2010‑11, the Proposition 98 funding would be $48.4 billion, of which $35 billion is General Fund money.

With the state facing a $19 billion deficit ­– and additional deficits for at least the following two years, even if this big budget hole is fixed ­– these are desperate times. But keep in mind that, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst, per pupil K-12 spending will have dropped 11.3 percent, from $8,364 to $7,417, in four years if the Legislature passes the governor’s budget. That’s a bigger cut than community colleges or California State University and the University of California will have felt. (Spending on four-year universities will actually have increased, but only because students and their parents have been socked with higher fees.)

The severity of budget cuts will vary among school districts, in part because of how they decided to spend federal stimulus dollars – $3 billion for California – that the Obama administration pushed through. Prudent districts have spread the money out into the coming year. But 40 percent of districts spent nearly all of it this year, compounding the deficit they’ll face starting July 1.

For more budget analysis, see an EdSource section devoted to the budget.