Running on empty: Schools cope with the rollercoaster world of cost run-ups and budget let-downs 

Public education is a bit like riding a rollercoaster, except that in education the thrill tends to come on the way up, when the economy is flying high, funding is flush—relatively speaking, of course—and the future feels as bracing as the wind rushing past.

This is not one of those times. The economy—national, state, local, you name it—seems to be rocketing downward, almost in freefall. Optimism plummets with each successive bit of bad news, much of it dealing with the simple cost of doing business.

The business of schools is educating kids. That’s the metaphorical bottom line, but there’s a numerical one too, a bottom line that school boards and school leaders cannot long ignore. That bottom line says that the cost of educating kids—not to mention the cost of getting them to school and feeding them—has gotten, well, out of line.

“These are some of the most trying times we have faced,” says Matthew Belasco, food services director for the 16,500-student Tracy Unified School District, located west of Stockton in the Central Valley. “I have been in the food service industry for 20 years, and we have never seen a crisis such as this. Fuel, food prices, wholesale costs are all trending upward at a record pace, with no end it sight.”

Rising energy costs alone impact almost every school district in the country, according to a poll conducted earlier this year by the American Association of School Administrators. Ninety-nine percent of the superintendents surveyed said they and their boards had been compelled to act, from implementing energy conservation measures (the most popular action taken) to cutting back on field trips, eliminating staff positions or even closing schools. Sixteen of the 546 superintendents surveyed said their districts were moving to a four-day school week; another 81 said they were considering the possibility.

Running on empty

In far-flung, freeway-friendly California, rising gasoline and diesel costs can put a serious dent in the transportation budgets that get students from home to school and back again. A year’s worth of bus service, according to a California state auditor’s report, costs an average of almost $1,400 per student in urban districts, more than $900 in rural areas. The state picks up less than half of that $1.1 billion total transportation tab each year.

School districts and county offices of education must cover the rest—sometimes by requiring parents to buy bus passes that may cost hundreds of dollars per child annually, sometimes by siphoning off funds that might otherwise be spent for books, teacher salaries, facilities or smaller class sizes. When transportation becomes too expensive, districts and county offices most often respond by cutting and consolidating routes, further reducing the number of students who can avail themselves of transportation services.

Just 15 percent of the state’s K-12 students take a bus to school now, mostly those in special education or the youngest grades. But for those districts that do provide the service, busing isn’t cheap.

Consider the case of Poway Unified School District, just north of San Diego. It requires parents to pay $399 for each child’s annual bus pass. But even that revenue, combined with other funding sources, is no longer enough to cover costs. Last year Tim Purvis, the district’s director of transportation, budgeted $700,000 for fuel to run his fleet. He wound up spending $1.1 million when oil prices skyrocketed. This year, he’s budgeted $1.2 million.

“Based on projections, I’m feeling pretty good, but who knows what will happen,” Purvis worries.

Even with more money set aside, Purvis says he’s been forced to trim busing services this year. For example, the district has eliminated criteria that once qualified students for bus transportation, such as having no safe walking path to school or living near a busy intersection. The only routes remaining are those that pay for themselves for the most part—meaning those with 50 or more riders. That has caused up to 1,600 of Poway’s 32,000 students to scramble for alternative transportation.

“This was the first time we actually closed routes,” Purvis says, “and we ended up having to turn a lot of parents and kids away. It was not a good time, but we worked hard to communicate the reasons why, and folks here … have mostly understood, even when they didn’t like it.”

Reducing bus service can hardly be construed as a good thing, school transportation officials readily concede. It’s a last-resort necessity, they say, that creates other problems, such as putting more kids on the road in their own or their parents’ cars.

“You see a lot more cars in front of schools in the mornings and afternoons” since bus service was scaled back, Purvis observes. “Sadly, they’re not filled with one mom and eight kids, but one mom with her child. We’ve tried to adapt by shortening the areas restricted to bus loading and enlarging drop-off zones.”

It could be worse. Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County eliminated 44 of its 62 bus routes this year, leaving 5,000 of its 51,512 students looking for new rides. The reduction is projected to save the district a much-needed $3.5 million annually, but it may only add another headache: Opponents have threatened to sue the district, claiming it failed to consider the implications of increased traffic, noise and pollution.

Those aren’t the only reasons that advocates of bus services cite for their cause. Mike Martin, executive director of the National Association for Pupil Transportation in Albany, N.Y., argues that buses are the most cost-effective—and the safest—way to get the most children to class. Nationwide, approximately 800 children are killed and 152,000 injured each year traveling to and from school, according to a 2002 study by the National Research Council. Just 2 percent of those deaths and 4 percent of the injuries involve school buses. The rest are related to children walking or bicycling to school or traveling in family cars (particularly if the driver is a teen).

“It’s sort of a knee-jerk judgment that busing is more expensive,” objects Martin. “When policymakers are able to step back from [the] hysteria, they’ll see that money invested in transportation is probably one of their smarter investments. Buses get more kids to school on time, safely and reliably.”

Starved for funds

While the relative merits of school busing may be food for thought, the value of school nutrition programs is indisputable: Well-nourished students simply perform better—academically, emotionally and physically. It is this truth that underlies public education’s commitment to providing nutritious, appealing, affordable breakfasts and lunches to students at school, particularly those in financial need.

But rising food prices are eating away at many districts’ ability to do so. Basic food and service costs tracked by the Consumer Price Index jumped 5.1 percent from April 2007 to April of this year—and, in some cases, commodity costs leaped by double-digit percentages.

“We’re paying for milk what five years ago we paid for an entrée,” Rodney Taylor, Riverside Unified School District’s director of nutrition services, told his local newspaper.

A Fullerton School District survey found the price of eggs in that Los Angeles-area district increased by more than 30 percent during the last school year. Milk rose by 13.5 percent, cheese by 12 percent; poultry was a relative bargain, rising by just 5 percent. Add in higher costs for supplies, from recyclable utensils to paper plates and beyond, and it’s very easy, almost inevitable, to find oneself in the red.

Fullerton is considering a 55-cent increase in school meals to make up for a projected food services budget deficit of $212,000. It’s not alone. In Orange County, more than half of the area’s 28 school districts reportedly are or have considered increasing the price of school meals to offset budget deficits and rising expenses.

Districts are trying to avoid price increases by shopping smarter, selecting less expensive vendors or simply by doing for themselves. Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District in San Bernardino County, for example, now cooks its own pasta, sauce and ground beef in its 12 school kitchens instead of purchasing the entrée already prepared and frozen. Similarly, Corona-Norco Unified School District food service workers, 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles in Riverside County, make their own turkey submarine sandwiches rather than buy them in bulk from a local eatery. A bonus: Students reportedly like them better.

Belasco, the food services director at Tracy Unified, reports his district has chosen not to raise meal prices—at least for now. “I felt if we could continue to increase efficiency, we could continue to remain solvent,” he says, and that will help “at a time when families are facing some tough economic times.”

Strategies Belasco has emphasized include eliminating waste and unpopular menu items (which often end up as waste), streamlining food delivery routes to save fuel, and buying smarter. “We really run a tight ship,” he says.

For similar reasons, Warren Sun, the food services director for the 29,800-student Lodi Unified School District in the Central Valley, says he has managed to avoid seeking a price increase this year: “Our first concern was about passing the increased cost to the families. It would place a bigger burden on those already having a difficult time in this challenging economy.”

Raising prices might also worsen the problem—for those families and for the district.

“We were concerned it would have led to a loss in participation for breakfast and lunches which, in turn, could lead to decreased sales,” Sun says.

School meal prices have gone up in the 17,300-student Ventura Unified School District, according to Sandy Curwood, Ventura’s food and nutrition services director. It’s the first time in six years. Like others, Curwood says she’s placed a premium on cost-saving measures like using fewer paper goods and not replacing equipment.

“These things do not affect the quality or quantity of our foods. We’re still a good deal for a great meal,” she boasts.

A good deal indeed. Even when students pay full price for a meal, districts can still lose money. According to the School Nutrition Association, the price of a school lunch averages $1.90, but it actually costs at least $2.66 to prepare. So even with a 23-cent per meal subsidy from the federal government, districts may lose at least 53 cents for each full-priced lunch served.

The mother of invention

If there’s a silver lining behind the gathering fiscal clouds, it’s a reflection of the innovation and resilience of governance teams. Some districts redistribute funding. The 3,640-student Oak Park Unified School District in Ventura County, for example, recently shifted more than $300,000 from maintenance to its general fund, and it’s not the only district that’s done so.

Every bit helps: In the 3,000-student K-8 Lowell Joint School District in Whittier, for example, they’ve switched to hand towels made from recycled paper, saving $20,000 a year. Staffers print faxes and some other items on recycled paper, and they print on both sides when possible.

Del Norte County Unified School District, tucked away in the upper northwest corner of the state in Crescent City, came up with a novel approach to its problems with declining enrollment and the commensurate drop in state funding. Five years ago, the district enrolled more than 4,100 students in its 11 public schools. Last year, enrollment was 3,625, a decline of almost 12 percent—representing almost $3 million in lost revenue at the roughly $6,150 that the state parcels out in annual per-student funding.

Del Norte officials responded in part with a marketing campaign to attract new students, bring others back into the fold and reduce the number of students leaving. The first phase of the campaign was funded with a modest $6,000 for advertising in local newspapers, radio and TV. Under the slogan “Where Memories Are Born,” it highlighted programs district officials thought the public might not fully appreciate or know about at all—everything from art and music classes to field trips and free and reduced-price meals.

The effort appears to have had an impact.

“We have finally turned the corner,” says CSBA Region 1 Director Bob Berkowitz, a member of Del Norte’s board. “Instead of losing our customary 200 students [a year], we gained 35. This means we had a turnaround of 235 students.

“We figured it would only take about four students to pay for the marketing program. As you can see, we far surpassed our goal. Keep in mind that we have had no change in the population make-up of the county in the last year. No new industries have moved in or out, and the total population has remained about the same. The only difference has been the marketing program.”

Education: An investment

But innovation and economizing have their limits. Some districts are forced to take painful actions, and those can hit harder where lower enrollments rule out the economies of scale that larger operations might be able to exploit. The 690-student Twain Harte-Long Barn Union Elementary School District in rural Tuolumne County, for example, closed one of its five elementary campuses, shifting students to another school.

“It was not met favorably by the community,” acknowledges Tonya Midget, the district’s chief business official. “It took six months of board meetings to convince people that we had no choice.” (Ironically, the district is still paying for the closed school, which was built in 1998. Midget says the district is currently using the building for some district functions and programs, but it’s also also looking for a paying tenant to lease at least some of the space.)

Hard times afflict districts large and small, of course, and one of the line items eyed for savings inevitably ends up being one that’s also among the largest costs: personnel. San Diego Unified School District isn’t alone in being forced to cut back; it laid off 200 probationary teachers, although officials say they hope to rehire many of them on temporary contracts (with benefits) if aggressive plans to boost enrollment succeed.

Some governance teams do a bit of everything: San Marcos Unified School District in northern San Diego County pushed the start of the school year from August to September, and it eliminated busing for regular education students in elementary and middle school. (High school busing had been eliminated years before.) It laid off dozens of teachers, counselors and bus drivers serving the 16,000 students, and it approved bigger class sizes in some middle and high school courses. Projected cost savings: $5.8 million.

If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that there are probably at least as many ideas for saving money as there are school board members in the state—and there are more than 5,000 of those. As long as creative and conscientious candidates offer their services, California is guaranteed a good return on its investment in the future, which resides in its children.

Scott LaFee is a regular contributor to California Schools.