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MARIN CATHOLIC VS. CARDINAL NEWMAN BUDGET GAP

marinij.com

TITLE GAME HAS

EXTRA EMOTION
Novato
schools
facing
big cuts
District officials are hoping
to avoid teacher layoffs
By Keri Brenner
kbrenner@marinij.com
@KeriWorks on Twitter

The Novato Unified School District needs to

come up with about $2 million annually in cuts
for the next three years to plug a hole in its gen-
TOP: ANDA CHU BAY AREA NEWS GROUP / ABOVE: JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO BAY AREA NEWS GROUP eral fund budget, school officials said this week.
Top, a singed cross still stands at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa, which was heavily damaged during the Theres not really a fixed number, said Su-
October inferno. Above, Cardinal Newman quarterback Beau Barrington (7) is hugged by head coach Paul Cronin as his perintendent Jim Hogeboom. Weve kind of set
mother Kristi Barrington stands by before a game Nov. 4. Barrington was one of the players who lost their home in the fire. about $2 million were deficit spending every
Cardinal Newman plays Marin Catholic on Saturday in a North Coast Section title game. year, and our ending fund balance is going down
by $2 million or $3 million a year, so were kind

Santa Rosa school still of shooting for $2 million.

coping with fire losses
By Danny Schmidt
dschmidt@marinij.com
@therealdschmidt on Twitter
Outside of Marin County,
it may be difficult to find
anyone cheering for the
Marin Catholic High School
football team against Santa
Rosas Cardinal Newman
on Saturday night.
The top-seeded Wild-
cats (11-0) are certainly the
antagonists in this Hol-
lywood-esque script of a
North Coast Section Di-
vision III championship
game, which takes place 13
miles south of Newmans
campus in Rohnert Park.
Nearly two months ago,
Santa Rosa was ravaged by
the North Bay fires. The in-
ferno destroyed homes of 90
Cardinal Newman students
including five players on
the football team plus
EX-NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER
the homes of three coaches
on its staff, as well as more
than half of the campus.
At that point, football
took a backseat because
there was so much healing
that needed to be done,
15th-year Cardinal Newman
coach Paul Cronin said. We
took everything one day at
a time and tried to normal-
ize our new normal. There
were so many distractions
and the emotions were so
difficult.
Football was not forgot-
ten for long, however. The
entire program coaches,
players and families met
to pray and eat dinner on
the Friday after the fires
began. Players bombarded
Cronin with requests to find
a practice field, desiring a
diversion. One week after
the fires began, the team
SANTA ROSA PAGE 2
DOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN SPECIAL TO MARIN INDEPENDENT JOURNAL
Marin Catholic players line up for a kickoff against Bishop
ODowd on Nov. 25. The Kentfield school raised $25,000
for Cardinal Newman.
NCS D-III CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
Game: No. 1 Marin Catholic (11-0) vs. No. 2 Cardinal New-
man (10-2), 7 p.m. at Rancho Cotate High, Rohnert Park
At stake: North Coast Section Division III championship.
Familiar territory: Marin Catholic will be making its
seventh consecutive appearance in the NCS title game
and its eighth in the last nine seasons. The Wildcats have
won three section titles in the past eight seasons, most
recently a 38-21 victory over Cardinal Newman in 2015.
In Sports: Game preview, C1
Info: cifncs.org/
Assistant Superintendent Yancy Hawkins,
speaking Thursday before nearly a dozen par-
ents at the Sinaloa Middle School library, said at
least three factors are punching holes in the dis-
tricts $80 million spending plan: steeply rising
pension costs, declining enrollment and lagging
state funding.
Teacher layoffs are a possibility, Hawkins said
although Hogeboom said the district was hop-
ing to avoid that option by not filling vacancies
when people leave or retire.
Its a little bit nerve-wracking, said Dina
Gibbons-Miguel, who has children at the dis-
tricts Pleasant Valley Elementary School and
at Sinaloa. I didnt realize that we will be run-
ning at a deficit on the budget this year and that
were currently now at about 4 percent over in
SCHOOLS PAGE 6
WASHINGTON
McConnell: Senate
has votes to pass
tax code overhaul
By Alan Fram, Marcy Gorden
and Stephen Ohlemacher
The Associated Press
Republicans used a burst of elev-

Flynn pleads guilty to lying to FBI

WASHINGTON >>
enth-hour horse-trading to edge a nearly $1.5 tril-
lion tax bill to the brink of Senate passage Friday,
as a party starved all year for a major legislative
triumph took a step toward giving President Don-
ald Trump one of his top priorities by Christmas.
Cooperating with probe We have the votes, Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared after leaders

into Russian meddling swayed holdout senators by agreeing to fatten

By Carol D. Leonnig,
Adam Entous, Devlin
Barrett and Matt
Zapotosky
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON >> Former na-
tional security adviser Mi-
chael Flynn pleaded guilty
Friday to lying to the FBI
about his contacts with
Russian Ambassador Sergey
Kislyak and, in an ominous
sign for the White House,
said he is cooperating in
the ongoing probe of pos-
sible coordination between
the Trump campaign and
the Kremlin to influence the
2016 election.
When Flynn was forced
out of the White House in
February, officials said he
had misled the administra-
tion, including Vice President
FLYNN PAGE 2
tax breaks for millions of businesses and let peo-
ple deduct local property taxes.
The Senate was on track to give near party-line
approval to the measure by late Friday, setting
up negotiations with the House for a final pack-
age. The measure focuses the bulk of its tax re-
ductions on businesses and higher-earning indi-
viduals, gives more modest breaks to others and
would be the boldest rewrite of the nations tax
system since 1986.
Republicans touted the package as one that
would benefit people of all incomes and ignite
ESSDRAS M SUAREZ WASHINGTON POST the economy. Even an official projection of a $1
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn leaves the trillion, 10-year flood of deeper budget deficits
courthouse on Friday. TAX CODE PAGE 6

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INDEX Obituaries...... A10 Opinion............ A11 Movies..............B5 TV.............. B6 Sports................C1 Classifieds........D1 Volume 156, issue 255 0 40901 29001 8