Vantage point: SB 81 shows need for openness in state budget
By:
CSBA President Jill Wynns
Published: February 27, 2012
With the recent enactment of Senate Bill 81, we felt it necessary to communicate with governing board members and superintendents statewide about CSBA’s support for this measure. As you may recall, SB 81 is the bill that changed the $248 million trigger cut to home-to-school transportation and turned it into an across-the-board reduction to revenue limits.
While many districts expressed their deep gratitude and appreciation for our data runs that showed the disparity of the transportation cut, we have also heard expressions of concern from some districts that the bill will result in a cut that is larger than if SB 81 had not been introduced.
On behalf of the Board of Directors and officers of CSBA, I want to assure you that CSBA was well aware of the impact of SB 81, and we’re committed to working toward reforming and modernizing the transportation funding formula. But we were also well aware of the enormous differences district-by-district if the cuts were targeted to transportation. However, we were faced with a budget trigger that was crafted without the benefit of input from knowledgeable school finance experts outside of the Department of Finance.
When the issue was discussed in January by the CSBA Board of Directors, we decided to pursue SB 81 based on the following historical positions:
- When Tier 2 and Tier 3 categorical programs were cut by 20 percent in 2008-09, there was an agreement among all of the education groups and various school district and county office of education advocates that cutting those programs was bad public policy in that the cuts hit local educational agencies so differently. Part of that agreement was a call to the Legislature and to the administration that any further cuts to schools should be levied against revenue limits, as those types of reductions hit LEAs more fairly.
- During the discussion about the categorical cuts in 2008-09, basic aid districts agreed to a fair share cut.
- Reductions since 2008-09 have mostly been levied against revenue limits as a result of the position. Additionally, basic aid districts have come to expect fair share cuts each year, including in SB 81.
- The majority of members of our Board of Directors saw data runs showing that their specific school districts would be cut more with SB 81 than without SB 81. Given that, the board overwhelmingly felt that SB 81 represented a consistent approach to implementing funding cuts given the communitywide position since 2008-09.
- The benefits of SB 81 meant a savings of hundreds of dollars per student in mostly small, rural districts—and a cost, albeit at a significantly lower rate—for others. But overall, the bill resulted in a flattening of the impact of the trigger cut across LEAs of all sizes and types.
From the perspective of school finance experts in Sacramento, including our own, if the education community had been consulted on how to draft a budget trigger, it would have looked significantly different. But that was not the case, which begs for a more open state budget process, especially in the last few days of budget negotiations.
We certainly are not saying that any cuts that come about as a result of the state’s funding crisis are easy for LEAs to implement. We all look forward to a budget that we can adopt where we are able to actually add programs back that will serve the needs of our students.
In the meantime, home-to-school transportation is currently the focus of discussion in Sacramento as the Legislature begins digesting the governor’s budget proposal generally and his weighted student formula in particular. Assuming transportation funding survives the discussion, CSBA is committed to working toward reforming and modernizing the transportation funding formula.