CA State Budget Crisis – Confronting Reality
For the past six years, the normal cycle has been like this. The Governor releases a January budget proposing significant reductions to public education funding. Education groups like PTA, CTA and CSBA advocate for children and somehow the reductions go away. However, this time was different. On February 20, 2009 the signing of the 17 month State budget signaled a new reality for California school boards.
Confronting Reality
The approved State budget dramatically reduces the amount of ongoing revenue for a school district. For example for Alameda Unified, the beginning 2008/09 funding level of per student funding on July 1, 2009 was $5,801. On February 20 the funding level was lowered to $5,627. The news gets worse since the February budget continues into 2010. The 2009/10 funding level drops to $5,575 per student. For Alameda Unified with 10,000 students, the $226 decline in per student funding represents $2,000,000 of ongoing annual revenue lost. Meanwhile, ongoing expenses for personnel, technology and operations (energy, insurance, etc.) are increasing. Therefore, the gap between ongoing revenues and ongoing expenses is even larger and signals a need for a new level of budget review and preparation.
Clarifying Expectations
The three options for school districts (1. increase revenues 2. reduce expenses or 3. a combination of 1 and 2) needs to be decided when the school board approves their 2009/10 budget by June 30, 2009. The biggest challenge facing us is aligning the fiscal realities with community expectations regarding the services we have been providing. Programs like class size reduction are extremely popular with parents yet represent an area where significant cost reductions can occur if eliminated.
As I mentioned in this prior post on Budget Reductions and Community Engagement, starting an ongoing dialogue is crucial as it appears school districts finances will be facing significant reductions for a number of years.
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