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Voters will get to decide in November whether to give the Tucson Unified School District more tax money, while parents will pay more for their students' meals and sports next school year, the Governing Board voted unanimously Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, 14 schools will share seven principals as district officials continue to search for ways to close a remaining $5 million budget shortfall next year.

To deal with rising food and fuel costs, the district will ask elementary students to pay another quarter for each meal, bringing breakfast to $1.25. Lunch will go up to $1.75.

Middle- and high-school students will see breakfast prices increase from $1.10 to $1.50, while lunch will go up a quarter to $2.25.

High school students also will pay $20 more for extracurricular activities such as sports, chess or drama — up to $50 per activity, with a $200 annual cap per family — and middle-school students for the first time ever will have to fork over a fee to participate in after-school activities. The middle-school fee will be $20 and will cover up to four activities.

Although no one testified against the fee increases, the audience did break out in whoops and applause when the board unanimously agreed to ask voters to tack 10 percent onto its existing budget limit — roughly $27 million — to shrink class sizes, increase arts funding and pay more for hard-to-fill teaching positions in math, science and special education.

Some, waving signs that read, "Our kids can't wait," gave the board a standing ovation.

"For 33 cents a day — less than a cup of coffee or a copy of the morning paper — we can make sure our children get the education they deserve," said Robin Hiller, who leads the non-profit Voices for Education, which advocates for smaller class sizes.

Roughly half of the new money would go to smaller class sizes. Under the proposal, kindergarten through second grades would be capped at 18 students, while sixth- through eighth-grade math classes would be limited to 22.

"The timing has to be now, folks," said former board member Mary Belle McCorkle, who spearheaded the exploratory effort to determine if an override was feasible. The board has already been forced to increase class sizes and cut arts funding, so putting a vote off until the November 2009 election would mean an untimely delay. "We can't wait another two years," she said.

The board earned its boos, too, from members of the audience who had hoped the Governing Board would can the proposal to split one principal between two small schools. Instead, it passed 4-1, with only board member Judy Burns opposed.

Supporting board members said that after voting last month to keep four small schools open, they had to come up with creative ways to save money elsewhere. The proposal is expected to save about $500,000.

"We do have to chip away at this $5 million deficit we have and this gets us one-tenth of the way there," said board member Bruce Burke.

The average elementary school has 486 students, said Superintendent Roger Pfeuffer. The seven pairs of schools will have anywhere from 414 to 532 students. Each will also get a $7,500 stipend to pay for a lead teacher to fill in for the principal when needed.

None of the schools are facing school-improvement plans.

The seven elementary pairs will be: Henry and Wrights-town; Borton and Holladay; Manzo and Jefferson Park; Rogers and Sewell; Davis and Roskruge; Carrillo and Richey; and Bloom and Van Horne.

The board tried this a few years ago with dismal results, reversing the policy after only one year. Pfeuffer said flaws in the system — principals sharing schools that had vastly different missions, for example, or that were geographically distant — have been addressed.

Pfeuffer said one of the principals in each pair currently will stay on, with the other seven filling vacant positions elsewhere in the district.

Cyrus Miller, who has children at Wrightstown Elementary, said a better name for the shared-principal program would be the "part-time-principal program."

The district is undermining efforts to stabilize the school, which had been on the chopping block because of its size, he said. "We're working hard at keeping our enrollment up so please don't go with this split principal program."

But board member Joel Ireland said small schools are simply too expensive and need to come up with more efficient operating plans.