School board OKs budget, LCAP

School budget calls for spending nearly $50 million|

The Sonoma Valley Unified School District board Tuesday approved a balanced budget for the coming fiscal year that starts July 1.

The meeting was the first for new district Superintendent Socorro Shiels.

The district has been deficit spending in the recent past, but if there’s a celebration, it’ll be short-lived since Bruce Abbott, the associate superintendent Business Services, told the board the district will be back in deficit spending the year after next.

The budget calls for spending $49.84 million on revenues of $49.95 million.

The district is projected to receive $38.9 million in LCFF (the state’s local control funding formula), a little over $2 million in federal money, $4.5 million in other state revenue and almost $4.4 million in other local revenues.

The lion’s share of expenses go to certificated salaries ($19.5 million), classified salaries ($7.66 million) and benefits ($14.76 million) – or 84.2 percent.

Abbott told the board that he expects property tax growth to be about 4 percent and is looking for less money in federal Title I funding.

“We’ve also been getting one-time funds from the state for about four or five years, so it’s hard to call them ‘one-time funds,’” he said.

He said for the next five years, he’ll keep the 4 percent property tax growth, but not budget as much for redevelopment funds.

“We need to understand what the drivers are,” he said.

Starting next year, the district will go to a new zero-based budgeting system where it’s built from the ground up each year instead of rolling it over.

“We came out positive (this year),” Abbott said. “But we have a lot more work to do.”

And with a new governor coming into office in January, he’s not sure what the state’s approach to education will be.

One reason the budget is balanced is because the board cut $2.5 million through personnel reductions a couple of months ago.

“This is like a voyage with a lot of mid-course corrections,” said board member Dan Gustafson.

Fellow board member John Kelly was happy the budget is balanced for the first time in years. “After all the pain and suffering, we have a balanced budget,” he said. “From now on, we’re going to rebuild the document from the ground up,” he said. “We’re not going to do it this way again.”

Kelly pointed to one sentence in the telephone-book sized document. A sentence that said, “Deficit spending was eliminated with staffing reductions.”

“We did the work,” Kelly said. “But people got hurt.”

Because of Abbott’s budget memo and his explanation, the board approved the budget with a minimum of discussion, on a 4-0 vote. Trustee Nicole Ducarroz was absent.

The board also approved the latest LCAP, the Local Control Accountability Plan. While it was also a 4-0 vote, there were some parents who asked the board to scrap it and start anew.

According to the district’s website, “(the LCAP) is the guiding document that defines local and state priorities for student success and the district spending plans to achieve and fund those priorities. It is the only point of leverage for school accountability for parents, teachers and the broader community. At a minimum, the LCAP must address eight (8) state priorities.”

These eight priorities include basic services, implementation of state standards, course access, student achievement, student engagement, other student outcomes and parental involvement.

Anne Ching wanted the board to reject the 151-page LCAP document. She told the board that there were no metrics – and no accountability.

She complained that past reports have been unintelligible with no continuity or follow-ups.

“In our 2017-18 priorities, did we do what we said we’d do?” she asked. “We don’t know if we did well.”

Ching said the district spent $432,000 to help English-language learners with before- and after-school and summer instruction.

“But we don’t have any raw numbers,” she said. “We have no idea how many students we served. Are we serving the kids we say we’re serving?”

And she pointed out the district spent $850,000 in math, science and technology. “We don’t have any raw numbers there either,” she said.

And parent Celeste Winders also complained that the parents of the students who were supposed to be served “weren’t even at the table.”

Winders, too, charged that the district isn’t serving the students its supposed to serve.

Kelly admitted that somewhere along the line, the LCAP has changed from a planning document to a compliance document. “But it’s possible that the LCAP will disappear with a new governor,” he said. “This was Jerry Brown’s brainchild.”

Gustafson admitted it was a flawed document, “but it’s the best we could do; the last year has been a survival year.”

The board is taking July off and will meet again in August.

Email Bill at bill.hoban@sonomanews.com.

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