News Impacting CA Schools for the Week Ending March 12
Federal
Up to $200 million in federal stimulus funds could be in jeopardy unless the state answers allegations that it is using accounting tricks to cover up a lack of spending on public education.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative released a draft of K-12 standards for public comment. The Educated Guess review the implications for California.
Sacramento
The State Board of Education unanimously approved the revised list of 188 failing schools. The schools on the list are supposed to comprise the 5 percent of “persistently lowest performing schools” in need of drastic intervention. They’ll be eligible to apply for federal School Improvement Grants of between $150,000 and $6 million over the next three years.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Many believe the political process needs reform in the area of campaign financing. The FPPC’s report, entitled “Big Money Talks,” delves into the 25 biggest – at least in financial terms – political players in the state, which have collectively spent $1.3 billion on political actionin the last 10 years.
School Districts Impacts
With March 15 on Monday, school districts completed taking action on approving the issuing layoff notices across California. Here is a list of over 50 school districts from across California.
Capistrano Dixie Encinitas Fontana Glendora Liberty Long Beach Los Angeles Mt Diablo Murrieta Norwalk-La Mirada Oceanside Ontario-Montclair Poway Rio Sacramento City Saddleback San Ramon Valley Walnut Valley
For the links to the other news articles for school districts on the list, read the February 26 and March 5 recaps.
News Impacting CA Schools for the Week Ending March 5
Federal
California didn’t make the cut for taking home cash in the first round of the Race to the Top competition for federal stimulus funds for education.
Sacramento
Democrats in the Legislature took a step toward restoring $900 million of the more than $2 billion that Gov. Schwarzenegger has proposed to cut from K-12 schools and community colleges. The “gas-tax-swap” bill would hold the schools harmless by raising the percentage of the general fund that must go toward K-14 schools. The Governor hasn’t said whether he would sign the bill.
A bill in the California Legislature would give three school districts more freedom in how it spends state money. The bill would relax spending restrictions on state funds for up to three eligible districts as part of a pilot program. The added flexibility would begin in 2011 and run through 2014. The bill was introduced by Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, and sponsored by the Long Beach Unified.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez said he is prepared to ask the Legislature to put California Forward’s proposal to lower the vote requirement for passing a budget on the November ballot.
With 80 initiative proposals currently circulating throughout California, Secretary of State Debra Bowen today reminded voters of their key rights and responsibilities when deciding whether to sign petitions.
A new study says the economic downturn has prompted 17 states to make cost-cutting public pension reforms during the last two years — lower benefits for new hires, extended retirement ages and bigger payments from workers. California is not among them.
School Districts Impacts
The list of March 15 notices is over 35 school districts.
Los Angeles
The Los Angeles school board unanimously approved sending nearly 5,200 layoff notices to teachers, administrators, counselors and nurses, as the district looks to close a $640 million budget deficit for the next school year.
Murieta
Murieta staff expects about 175 teachers to get layoff notices, including some who have been with the district since 2003.
Pomona
The school board has voted to send out preliminary layoff notices to 321 certificated employees. Of the 321 employees due to receive notices, 293 are teachers.
Chino Valley
Teachers and students are reeling from a school board decision to close the Chino Valley Unified Adult School on July 1. In addition the Board is expected to approve the release of about 87 preliminary layoff notices.
Placentia-Yorba Linda
The Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District has reached a tentative furlough agreement with the group that could save the district $1.6 million. In exchange for the 10 furlough days, which amount to about a 2.1 percent pay cut this school year for most of the employees, the district has agreed not to lay off any more support staff during this school year and to not lay off more than 5 percent of staff in the 2010-11 school year.
Brea Olinda
The Brea Olinda Unified School District could be sending layoff notices to more than 30 teachers and an unknown number of classified employees to help resolve a projected $3.5 million deficit due to ongoing cuts in state funding.
Calaveras
The elimination of two dozen teachers - the equivalent of 23.12 full-time positions – would save the district $1.2 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1, said Calaveras officials.
Paramount
The Paramount Unified School District wants employees to take four unpaid furlough days next academic year as part of a plan to cut $3.2 million from its 2010-2011 budget. In addition, the board could decide to warn 10 elementary teachers and two intervention teachers that they may lose their jobs at the end of the school year.
Modesto
The board voted 6-1 to begin layoff proceedings for more than 300 teachers, counselors, nurses and librarians, setting up negotiations with employee unions.
Castro Valley
The Board approved just over $5 million in cuts from next year’s budget, which will eliminate about 50 teaching and management positions in the district.
Lompoc
Every employee of the Lompoc Unified School District just lost eight working days from the 2010-11 school year. The question of whether to accept the furlough decision now will be posed to the labor organizations.
Ojai
The board approved layoff notices for 51 certificated employees at a meeting Tuesday night. The list includes about 40 full-time classroom teachers and five full-time support and administrative positions.
Twin Rivers
Twin Rivers Unified School District trustees discussed whether to issue pink slips to more than 400 employees. Of those proposed layoff notices, 226 were to be given to classified employees – clerks, custodians, library workers, bus drivers and maintenance personnel and their supervisors.
Oxnard
Prompted by proposed state funding cuts, Oxnard School District trustees approved a list of layoff notices for about 30 teachers.
Walnut Valley
The Walnut Valley Unified School District board of trustees voted Wednesday night to notify 54 elementary school teachers and about 30 high school educators of their possible layoffs for the 2010-11 school year.
March 15 Notices
Using the weekly recaps of February 19 and February 26, I have created a spreadsheet of issued and potential March 15 notices issued by school districts across California. I will update the spreadsheet each Friday as part of weekly recap of news impacting school districts.
California March 15 Notices 2010
News Impacting CA School Districts Through February 26
Federal News
A coalition of education organizations and nearly 100 school districts has called on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to deny Gov. Schwarzenegger’s request for a waiver to cut K-12 spending as much as he proposes. If Duncan buys their argument, the governor would have to come up with an additional $850 million for schools.
In a proposed change to the No Child Left Behind law, the Obama administration would require states to adopt new academic standards to qualify for federal money from a $14 billion program that concentrates on impoverished students.
Sacramento News
The Legislative Analyst Office has released its fiscal analysis of the four propositions appearing on the June 8 primary ballot.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office has issued its analysis of the state’s education budget in two reports: The 2010-11 Budget: Proposition 98 and K-12 Education and Higher Education.
Reforming State and Local Governance
The Open Primary initiative which will be opposed by the Democratic and Republican parties will be on the June ballot. Considering both parties will be opposing it maybe enough reason to vote Yes to change things in Sacramento.
School District Impacts
Lake Elsinore
Members of the union that represents nonteaching personnel in the Lake Elsinore school district voted to reject a proposal to take a pay cut to help save jobs.
News Impacting CA Schools for the Week Ending February 19
Federal
The White House and the Department of Education have announced a new Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge and are inviting public schools across the country to compete to have President Obama speak at their graduation.
Sacramento
The state Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would require Amazon.com and other online retailers to charge sales tax on purchases in California, generating an estimated $107 million a year. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to veto the measure when Democrats proposed it last year, and it stalled in committee. But Democrats reintroduced it Thursday in a tax enforcement bill that was part of a $5 billion budget package moving through the Legislature.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Labor unions have contributed 1 million dollars into a proposed ballot measure that would change the legislative vote requirement to pass a state budget from two-thirds to a simple majority. The committee is backing the “On-Time Budget Act of 2010”. The proponents have until May 10 to gather valid signatures from at least 694,354 registered voters in order to put the proposed constitutional amendment on November’s ballot.
News Impacting CA School Districts Through February 12
Federal News
The Obama administration trumpeted last fall that school districts had used stimulus money to save, or create, some 250,000 education jobs. Now the new studies point to the problems likely to beset thousands of school districts when the federal money runs out.
A new task force is charged with developing an interagency action plan to solve the problem of obesity among our Nation’s children as part of the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign. The campaign will take a comprehensive approach to engage both public and private sectors to help children become more active and eat healthier within a generation, so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.
State Controller John Chiang reported that California collected $1.28 billion more in January tax revenues than Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger projected in his current budget plan.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Staggered by a 25 percent loss in the last fiscal year, the board of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System began crafting a strategy to petition lawmakers for higher rates. CalSTRS gets more than $6.6 billion in annual contributions from the state, school districts and teachers. About $1.6 billion of that comes from the state.
News Impacting CA School Districts Through February 5
Federal News
As part of its commitment to transparency in governance, the Department of Education is providing the public with the applications it received from states applying to the Race to the Top program.
Sacramento News
The Legislative Analyst Office issued a report Education Mandates: Overhauling a Broken System. The report recommends eliminating the remaining mandates either in whole or part. By relieving schools from performing the vast majority of K–14 mandate requirements, resulting in more than $350 million in annual savings.
State Controller John Chiang issued a stern warning about California’s cash reserves, telling legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger they must act on nearly $9 billion in budget cuts the governor is seeking by March — or the state will run out of cash to pay its bills.
The San Diego Unified School District is working to eliminate the costly state penalties that come with raising class sizes past 20 students in the earliest grades. District administrators are working to help establish legislation that would suspend the fines at a time when the state is slashing funding to public education. San Diego Unified is working with local lawmakers to carry a bill.
Reforming State and Local Governance
Californians haven’t a clue where the state gets its money or how it spends it — basic essentials for people who want to run the show.
The California Teachers Association plans to begin gathering signatures for an initiative to repeal corporate tax benefits that lawmakers approved in the past two years. The tax changes are worth an estimated $1.7 billion annually and scheduled to begin in 2011-12. CTA wants to qualify the initiative for the November 2010 ballot.
News Impacting CA Schools for the Week Ending January 28
Federal
What concerns National School Board Association is the discussion of a shift from discretionary funds to competitive grants for much of the proposed increase in education funding. Obama already has announced plans to add $1.35 billion to the Race to the Top program, and Duncan indicated that the White House sees competitive grants as the best way to leverage a relatively small amount of money to maximize reforms.
There is a debate going on about whether the identity of the reviewers should be revealed before the Race to the Top grants are awarded.
Sacramento
Maybe the State Legislature should look to Oregon which passed ballot measures to raise taxes for schools. Two-thirds of adults surveyed in a Public Policy Institute of California poll say they support higher taxes to maintain funding for K-12 schools. And a full 82 percent, including a majority of Republicans polled, oppose cutting K-12 education to reduce the state budget deficit. No other part of state spending comes close to engendering such support in the poll.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has put organized labor squarely in his cross-hairs in 2010, opening a fight that will largely determine the shape of his final year in office. Schwarzenegger’s proposals would cut the size of the union workforce, reduce pay, shrink future pensions and roll back job protections won through collective bargaining.
The Legislature’s budget analyst recommended that lawmakers go along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut state employee pay, even without labor unions’ consent, saying the state’s fiscal distress warrants the action.
Twenty-two of state Sen. Joe Simitian’s colleagues in the Senate are co-sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow lower the threshold for passing a local school parcel tax from two-thirds to 55 percent.
News Impacting CA Schools for the Week Ending Jan 22
Federal
President Obama announced he’ll ask Congress for $1.35 billion to extend an education grant program for more states and local school districts to win grants.
Assuming that Congress goes along, districts will compete for an additional $1.3 billion Race to the top grants later this year or early in 2011. That way, innovative districts won’t be cheated by governors, like Rick Perry of Texas, who refused to compete for the money – dismissing Race to the Top as a federal intrusion – or states that submitted pedestrian applications that were denied money.
40 states and the District of Columbia submitted applications to compete in Phase 1 of Race to the Top. Which raises the question: Do Federal education dollars work? Here is the Department of Education’s 2009 assessment of education performance and accountability.
Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts jolted the political world, and may spell the end for President Obama’s health care legislation. But what are the edu-implications?
Sacramento
State Superintendent Public Instruction Jack O’Connell delivered his 7th annual State of Education Address. In his speech to educators, policymakers, students, and parents, O’Connell highlighted progress made over the past seven years in improving student achievement and applauded California’s educators for doing the hard work to achieve these results even as schools were forced to absorb deep cuts in funding.
News Impacting CA Schools for the Week Ending January 15
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If you missed the CSBA Forecast webinar, go here for all of the resources. The webinar included an economic forecast and an assessment of the impact of the Governor’s budget on school districts.
Federal
Why are school districts holding out in participating in Race To The Top funds when State policies are changing regardless of their participation?
In his proposed budget, the governor assumes that the federal government will grant the state a waiver so that the state can spend $600 million less on K-12 education than it promised the federal government it would as a condition of taking stimulus money last year.
The California Teachers Association is used to getting its way. The union that represents 340,000 public school teachers has traditionally been one of the most powerful forces in the Capitol. In the past decade, it spent $38 million on lobbying – more than anyone else in the state. So it was an unusual loss for the CTA when the Legislature last week approved the Race to the Top education bills that the union and its allies opposed.
Sacramento
While the LAO characterized the Governor’s budget as reasonable, the Legislature should assume that federal relief will be billions of dollars less than the Governor wants—necessitating that it make more very difficult decisions affecting both state revenues and spending. Therefore, the Legislature and the Governor need to agree to a framework to solve much of the budget problem by the end of March.
Much of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to save the state $1.6 billion by cutting state workers’ pay, boosting their pension contributions and limiting the government workforce can’t be done unilaterally but requires agreements from the public-employee unions or the Legislature – or both.