Vantage Point: Minimum or adequate funding? It’s time to talk 

By now, traditional-session schools have closed for summer vacation, graduations and promotions are over and most school boards have settled down to attend to summer business as maintenance and operations crews hastily work on deferred maintenance projects to get our schools ready for a fall opening. By now, we all would have adopted our 2005-06 budgets based on the assumptions of the governor’s May revision or the assumptions adopted by the Budget Conference Committee. The conference committee recommendations are much kinder to the education community than the governor’s proposal: by redirecting all one-time money to deficit reduction and mandate repayments, some money will be available to replenish depleted AB 1200 reserves or put back into programs that have been cut in prior years. In addition, the conference committee rejected the State Teachers Retirement System and AB 3632 mental health transfers into Proposition 98, and that potentially could have a huge impact on district ending balances. Needless to say, these recommendations need the signature of the governor and that is problematic. Budget timelines make it necessary to budget for these increased costs. Thus, the real impact of the state’s budget crises and the governor’s proposals has been realized.

A case in point is my own school district’s budget. Over the last three years, we have cut or reduced expenditures by more than $1.5 million; in order to meet current 2005-06 projections, including the STRS shift, an additional $800,000 needed to be trimmed. A total of $2.3 million from a $24 million general fund budget – nearly 10 percent in cuts. The result was the elimination of music program teachers and a significant reduction in classified staff, including aides and custodial staff. This is the first time in 16 years on my board that staff reductions and layoffs were needed to balance the budget. This in a district that has been growing at 3-5 percent in ADA each year and benefits from growth dollars in the budget. Imagine the effect of the governor’s budget on the state’s 400 declining enrollment districts. So much for the apparent increase in school funding touted by the administration.

While the budget will be adopted and we will all deal with its intricacies, the rest of the summer will be devoted to a more critical issue: the fight to defeat the governor’s “Live Within Our Means” initiative in the special election. Our unenviable task will be to convince voters that the minimum funding guarantee for schools is worth saving. This will not be easy considering the number of conservative media outlets that exacerbate the problem by buying into the governor’s rhetoric.

As an example, Jill Stewart wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Daily News on June 12 titled “Voters need education on school funds.” In her opinion, schools have been misleading the public by claiming that we are $459 below the national average in per-pupil spending (which we are) when we are only $22 below the median per-pupil spending (which we are) and that a comfy 25th place is acceptable. Proposition 98 is sucking up money that should be dedicated to highways and health care, she says, and the voters need to be educated.

Herein lies the problem with statistics – anyone can make them prove any point they wish. But Ms. Stewart’s article misses the whole point of the school funding debate. Why should a state that has the sixth largest economy in the world, the highest educational standards of any state in the nation, the highest expectations of our students, the highest quality post-secondary education system in the country and the center of the technology and biotechnology revolutions accept the mediocrity of median spending on education? The discussion needs to be turned to what is an adequate level of funding to ensure that all children are successful at meeting our standards and have equal access to all educational opportunities – not whether we are 25th or 44th or even first in per-pupil spending. It’s not the voters that need education on school finance, it’s news writers like Jill Stewart who are ignorant of the intricacies of our current funding model.

On a lighter note, please join me at the annual conference this year and enjoy keynote speaker Juan Enriquez from the Harvard School of Business, who will be speaking about the biotechnology revolution and what it means to the future of our children. Mr. Enriquez is an expert on the Human Genome project and will enlighten us all on the need for advanced science education and the coming use of genomic information in business.