Last Tuesday night the Board held a special workshop meeting to begin discussing how we should structure the 2010/11 budget given the terrible fiscal environment the District is facing. We were fortunate to have leaders of many of our key budget partners (e.g., principals, SCEF, PTA) attend as well.
Most of the discussion centered around two questions posed by Craig Baker, our superintendent. First, how should potential new sources of income — from grant-writing or fee-for-service pre-school/after-school programs — be factored into the budget? Second, in what relative proportions should the four main budget-balancing tools — new sources of income, restructuring of how programs are delivered to students, reductions in non-personnel spending and reductions in compensation — be used to balance the budget? Closely related questions about what we should assume the size of the budget problem will be — since the fiscal situation is fluid enough that no one really knows what the future holds — and what our near-term reserve target should be were also discussed.
The “budget hole” appears to be, in the best-case scenario, at least $1.6 million. That’s the gap the District will have to close through increased revenues or decreased costs in the 2010/2011 school year to avoid deficit spending and come in at just slightly above the mandatory minimum 3% reserve requirement.
But for many reasons, staff recommends that we assume the “hole” is actually somewhere between $2.0 million and $2.2 million dollars. There are enough risks in the forecasts being provided by Sacramento, and we’ve had enough experience recently with the “final” state budget providing less money for education than was forecast, that it’s prudent to not assume the best-case scenario will occur.
If we plan on the hole being $2.2 million, staff’s current thinking is that about 35% of it should be covered by program restructuring and reductions and 11% should come from new sources of income, with the remaining 54% coming from reduced compensation expenses.
This is not an attractive picture, either for parents, who are justifiably nervous about reducing or changing educational programs (e.g., literacy support), or for District employees, who are seeing job eliminations and/or salary reductions. It is tempting to assume more support from new sources of income and, indeed, staff strongly believes that those new sources will very likely generate quite a bit more than the $250,000 per year they’ve assumed…eventually. Unfortunately, you can’t meet payroll with hopes, and we no longer have the reserves where we could afford to take a risk that a larger expected payoff from those new sources took longer to appear than we expected.
Under the heading of program restructuring and reductions staff presented a number of ideas after extensive discussion among the District office team and the principals. They include:
- Restructuring the way the literacy support program is managed and delivered;
- Having teachers take on most of the responsibility for delivering library services to students;
- Reducing the scope of middle school vice principal responsibilities while adding new ones, related to the new fee-for-service programs (e.g., pre-school, after school enrichment), that would be funded through grants;
- Shifting responsibility for the elementary music program to the middle school music staff;
- Bringing some aspects of new teacher training in-house;
- Reducing staff development time; and,
- Reducing infrastructure costs (e.g., copier leases, utilities
It was quite clear from the discussion Tuesday night that no one involved wants to do any of this. These are things that circumstances are forcing the Board to consider.
One option I have not mentioned is putting another funding measure before San Carlos voters. From prior discussions I’d say that the general sense of the Board is that this is not a good environment in which to do that. More importantly, the 2003 parcel tax — Measure D — expires on June 30, 2011. Renewing it — and the million dollars it contributes to the District — has to be a priority. A new funding measure would likely be a distraction from that goal, and might make renewal problematic.