A few days ago, the Governor released the first version of his proposed 2012-2013 budget. It will cut nearly $5 billion to public education if the voters reject the Governor’s plan to raise taxes in the fall (which will require a ballot initiative because 2/3 of the legislature will never vote for it). This is a smaller shortfall than in prior years, but still would cause significant pain to public schools. Although details are still unclear, even if his proposed tax measure were to pass, it would largely mean paying back money currently owed to public schools (e.g. Prop 98 increases that were not funded over the last few years) — it would hardly be a windfall for public education, but maybe would just get us to a point of fiscal stability.
The Governor’s proposed budget is based on a number of principles as it relates to K-12 education:
- Creating a new “weighted pupil funding” formula to simplify the current complicated and inequitable funding system — in principle, this makes a lot of sense, but the devil is in the details. It’s unclear if this would only affect Revenue Limit districts or all school districts. I think it’s good policy to give greater funding to low-income students and English learners, but it’s impossible now to measure how would this affect San Carlos. I think there’s a general principle to “hold harmless” school districts (i.e. don’t reduce anyone’s funding), but again details haven’t been worked out.
- Return more flexibility to the local level — this is something that school districts have been asking for a long time. Again, details haven’t been worked out, but this could likely include wiping out many categorical funding and mandates, but give more control to local school boards on how to best spend their money locally. There is also the notion of stricter accountability based on multiple measures of performance.
- Some flexibility around transitional kindergarten — the Governor is proposing that the new “transitional kindergarten” program, scheduled to start this Fall, be optional for school districts. SCSD is well on its way to planning for its Transitional K, so it’s unclear what the pros and cons would be of eliminating it. This will surely be a topic of an upcoming board meeting so we can understand the implications, financially and otherwise.
- Tax measure on the ballot — Gov. Brown announced earlier that he’ll seek a initiative on the November ballot to increase taxes. Although school districts would certainly benefit from a more stable state revenue source, it is unclear if such a measure could pass (and it probably wouldn’t be fiscally prudent to budget in anticipation of such a measure passing). If anything, there’s a risk that multiple seemingly similar measures will be on the ballot (all with slightly different approaches to raising money and to “reforms”) that they’ll effectively cancel each other out — voters who would otherwise support such a measure will only vote for one or two of them, leaving none with enough support. We’ll have to see how this plays out.
Silicon Valley Education Foundation had a few interesting articles that summarized the Governor’s proposals and the issues: Districts get power, if not cash, in Gov’s budget and Switch to weighted funding, local control.
I predict there will be many ups and down over the next twelve months, even though our 2012-2013 budget needs to be finalized within six months. We will have to budget in June based on some (probably conservative) assumptions as to how the state financing will turn out. I guess it would have been too much to ask for a smooth ride this year!
