Questions today from the Press Democrat/Sonoma Index-Tribune for Sonoma Valley Unified concern the District's basic aid status, which touches on a lot of other issues. Picture is of Siena and Ally, and me and my mom, from Thanksgiving weekend this year.
In 2022-23, Sonoma Valley Unified had $78,070,268.21 in actual revenues. When asked, experts will say that is approximately $11 million more than SVUSD would have received if, like roughly 90% of California's school districts, it was funded based on average daily attendance ("ADA") under the State's LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula).
Article IX, Section 6 of the California Constitution guarantees every school district in the state $120 per student (which is the "basic aid" so frequently referenced). There are no CALPADS reports (the State's official data system for students per District) on ADA for 2022-23 for SVUSD and there will not be any until the Spring of 2024. In 2021-22, the last year for which we have reported data, SVUSD's ADA was 3,001. Therefore, the basic aid for SVUSD, presuming that ADA held steady into 2022-23 (a big if) was $360,120 (that figure is not a mistake).
The call of the question, though is what would the LCFF base grant be for SVUSD presuming those numbers. In 2022-23, the LCFF base grant per student (which is probably what you're getting at) varied between $9,166 per ADA (what we would think of as a "student") in TK-3 to $11,102 for grades 9-12. There are a series of additional adjustments upward for some of these numbers. Again, using the 2021-22 ADA numbers, we would have expected LCFF base grant funding of about $33,011,000 in 2022-23. The presentation reported that SVUSD's funding per student (characterized as "Funding Per ADA" in the presentation) in 2022-23 was $14,563.31. That would amount to $43,704,493.31 in revenues for SVUSD. These numbers are clearly nowhere near the actual revenues of the District.
Deciphering these numbers demonstrates exactly why California school finance is so difficult for the voters to analyze. Based on my experience over the past decade with the school district, I don't believe these numbers illustrate in any meaningful way how a reasonable person should think about the budget. Instead, I think you have to start with actual revenues and the actual number of students meeting the standard for attendance (which is ADA). For SVUSD, for the last year we have full data, 2021-22, the total, audited, actual revenues were $71,619,903. The total, actual average daily attendance was 3,001. That translates into $23,865.35 per ADA. If we presume that ADA for 2022-23 just holds steady at 3,001, and with unaudited actuals of $78,070,268.21, that amounts to $26,014.75 per student in attendance.
[Combined 3-5.] Why are SVUSD’s 2023 student achievement scores in ELA and math lower than all the other districts that were included in the presentation (except for Plumas Unified in ELA)? What are the main reasons why SVUSD’s scores are low? Have you heard complaints from the greater SVUSD community about the district’s low scores, despite the additional property tax money it receives?
The school board is accountable for student performance, and it has inadequately employed the resources at its disposal, thereby fostering wastefulness. Additionally, the board's approval, on a 3-2 vote, of further deficit spending has severely compromised the budget's central role in sound fiscal planning. A rigorous approach is needed to create a balanced budget that accurately mirrors our revenue and expenditure forecasts. Such a budget serves as a dependable base for making strategic choices, allocating resources methodically, and planning for prospective growth, which is the cornerstone of the educational reform SVUSD so urgently needs to improve student performance.
Critically, I wish to stress that the board must avoid the misguided and antiquated tendency of laying blame on teachers for student performance. Incompetent architects blame their carpenters. We have outstanding teachers and we compensate them accordingly -- our teachers have, per the comments of Bernadette Weissmann (the union's negotiator) at the Fairmont UNITE HERE! rally on November 10, the best contract in Sonoma County. We have the talent necessary to achieve the results the community expects.
Yet spreading those terrific teachers out to sustain a physical footprint inherited from another century has undermined educational effectiveness. Realignment is urgently needed to focus resources on our at-need students. Spreading out Tier 1 implementation across too many sites, while not effectively supporting any of them, robs Tier 2 and Tier 3 of the resources to identify and serve students, and prevents us from fully implementing Universal Design for Learning ("UDL") strategies. These form the cornerstone of our multi-tiered systems of support ("MTSS"). Indeed, given the demographic projections for our District, even a 3-1-1 footprint may not be sustainable in the near future, which is exactly why our District needed to take prompt action this past March.
However, the June approval of millions of dollars in additional deficit expenditures for the current fiscal year, on the votes of trustees Ching, Knox, and Landry, has intensified the fiscal mismanagement. The precarious position a three-member majority has placed the District in has resulted from failing to make the hard choices regarding reducing our footprint to match our student population and improve student performance -- the board has refused to complete the realignment necessary to make the compensation for our teachers sustainable and implement educational reform. Indeed, the argument of Trustee Anne Ching precisely illustrates the point as documented in the Sonoma Sun on March 15 of this year, as "Ching believes the current financial scenarios allow the District to continue to operate as is, drawing down reserves which could last for five years." The District never could do anything of the sort.
Further, the inability to achieve a balanced budget led to a series of multimillion-dollar blunders in the Business Office when assembling the 2023-24 budget. The severity of these errors could exceed the District's unrestricted reserves and is expected to come fully to light at the First Interim in December. The existence of such chaos during a period of unprecedented revenue that has been on an upward trend for the last thirteen years is wholly unacceptable. SVUSD now finds itself in precisely the crisis that could have been avoided had realignment decisions been made in March, and had a balanced budget been passed in June, rather than the obviously inaccurate mess that was ultimately approved. Low student performance, a continued source of distress for our parents and community, meanwhile remains unaddressed.
6. SVUSD’s scores fared better in terms of change from 2022 to 2023. SVUSD showed more improvement or less of a decline than three of the nine school districts listed in ELA and five of the districts listed in math. What are your thoughts about this?
The decline in ELA performance was larger than the increase in Math. SVUSD's performance remains lower than the comparable basic aid Districts, and merely to equal the Math level of the District most similar to SVUSD (which notably has significantly more disadvantaged students than SVUSD), it would take approximately 15 years at the current rate. The low absolute level of performance means that fractional gains are far too slow (and that says nothing of the continued declines in ELA). This can't continue.
[Combined 7-8.] What is being done or can be done to improve SVUSD’s scores? Are you optimistic that they can be improved?
Realignment is critical to ensure that educational resources are no longer wasted. The board's refusal to make the tough calls necessary to balance the budget and match our schools to our students means SVUSD's finances are in disarray. The squandering of capital improvement dollars (including the failure to reserve funds necessary to retrofit Altimira Middle School and instead spend them on the SVHS science building on a 3-2 vote) has exacerbated these problems. The board must act in a unified fashion to address these concerns, but instead, a group of three trustees, specifically trustees Ching, Knox, and Landry, has saddled SVUSD with a set of decisions that make progress harder. This was done in the face of well-articulated reasons that none of those 3-2 votes should have been made. This has to end if we're going to make any meaningful progress on student performance.
9. Would you like to say anything else?
No, thank you.