Separate budget proposals from the governor and the Democrats would cut deeply into K-12 education. That doesn’t make them equal.

The most recent proposal from the Democrats would disproportionately take money from some struggling districts because a few of the specific programs to be eliminated are only for schools with low test scores. And Sacramento lawmakers would decide what would be cut.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal would cut equally across the board and leave local school boards the choice of what to cut — and the blame for it. It would also permanently remove the requirement that districts spend money on some vulnerable groups, such as foster children and students for whom English is a second language.

What cuts will end up looking like is not clear. The governor vetoed the Democrats’ proposal, and legislators have been holding closed-door talks with Schwarzenegger for weeks to try to solve the state’s deficit, which is projected to grow to $42 billion in 18 months.

The majority of the programs the Democrats would cut apply to all districts, such as funding for textbooks and teacher training. The money for struggling schools makes up a fraction of the proposed cuts.

School districts, unable to plan, are looking for certainty.

“My biggest concern is getting an answer,” said Sheri Gamba, budget chief for the West Contra Costa Unified School District. “Either answer is a bad answer for us.”

The district gets money from nearly every one of the programs the Democrats would have cut, Gamba said. That list includes the Emergency Repair Program and the High Priority Schools Grant Program, which are only for schools with lower test scores.

“We would have had the full blow,” Gamba said. “Because of the nature of our socio-economic demographic in our district and the kinds of grants that we’re eligible for, we would be hit hard.”

Because the governor vetoed the plan, Gamba did not calculate the precise cost of the Democratic proposal for the district.

In contrast, the Democratic proposal would be a better deal for the high-performing Acalanes Union High School District, said Chris Learned, the district’s assistant superintendent for business services.

According to Learned’s presentation to his district’s governing board, under the Democrats’ proposal, the Acalanes district would lose $1 million in midyear cuts, as opposed to $1.8 million under Schwarzenegger’s proposal.

That is the reverse of what the proposals would do statewide, according to Learned’s presentation: The Democrats’ proposal included $2.5 billion in midyear cuts, where the governor’s proposal had $2.1 billion.

In part, the difference is because Acalanes is a high school district, and some of the Democrats’ proposals affect only elementary education. But it’s also because the district gets none of the money targeted for struggling schools, Learned said.

Democrats were careful in how they proposed cuts, said Rick Simpson, deputy chief of staff to Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles. The legislature must set priorities, he said, not cut across the board.

“If you look at the categorical programs where we proposed making the cuts, they were almost all in programs that everybody gets,” Simpson said. “There were very few where we were proposing to make cuts where there is this kind of equity concern.”

The bigger threat to struggling populations is the governor’s proposal, which permanently takes away the guarantee that school districts will spend money on English learners and foster children among other “intensive interventions,” Simpson said.

The governor’s proposal would not cut funding for those programs, but would allow districts to spend that money however they pleased, even on things completely unrelated to the programs.

Regardless of whether that proposal is a good idea in the long run, “we don’t think that’s the kind of fairly sweeping policy change that one needs to do in a few weeks” in the midst of a budget crisis, Simpson said.

But districts need that flexibility in a crisis, said H.D. Palmer, deputy director of California’s Department of Finance. It’s what local administrators asked for when state officials talked to them about what they needed to get through the budget crunch.

“Let’s just tear down the walls” between different categories of funding, Palmer said. “This is one of the recommendations that came from the discussions we had with a variety of superintendents and other officials.”

Eliminating programs does nothing to give districts more flexibility to handle the difficult fiscal situation, Palmer said.

“It gives them far more local control over those dollars,” Palmer said.

Reach Paul Thissen at 925-943-8163 or pthissen@bayareanewsgroup.com.