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The Board of Education at the San Ramon Valley Unified School District voted to adopt a final budget for the 2024-25 school year at its last meeting of the 2023-24 school year, along with approving a resolution to reduce spending by $16.5 million in the 2025-26 school year.
The adopted budget for the current school year was approved unanimously at the board’s June 18 meeting following previous discussions on the draft budget at the June 11 meeting. As part of the budget adoption process, the board was also required to adopt a resolution directing staff to develop a plan to reduce spending in the next school year.
“We have identified the need to make ongoing reductions of $16.5 million beginning with the 25-26 school year,” Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Stella Kemp said in the June 18 meeting. “In order for the current budget that we are submitting to the county, the 24-25 budget, we need to include a resolution to show the county we have direction and board support to launch this work with our budget advisory committee.”
The committee is set to be developed in alignment with board policy launched in early fall, Kemp said.
“This committee would meet to evaluate and review opportunities for cost saving measures and provide recommendations to the board by December that then we would begin to use and implement over the budget planning cycle for the 25-26 school year,” Kemp said. “So this resolution is part of the budget package that we will send to the county.”
Kemp added that she would bring further details on the formation of the committee forward at the board’s July meeting.
“Do we invite or do we have people apply? And since this isn’t a Brown Act committee, we could go either way,” Kemp said. “And so I’d like to bring some options. If we go through the application process, it might take a little bit longer to select the committee versus suggest some names and we go out to those community members who could come in and serve on the committee.”
The resolution to identify spending reductions was also approved unanimously with little discussion, but that item as well as the 2024-25 school year budget had been the subject of public hearings and further conversations at the previous board meeting on June 11.
Among the points of discussion in a presentation on the current year’s budget on June 11 were the district’s multiple fiscal challenges that remain following $10 million in budget cuts approved earlier in the school year and in addition to the commitment to ongoing spending cuts of at least $16.5 million starting next year. These included maintaining reserves barely above the minimum with the adoption of the current budget, as well as assumptions that expenses will remain aligned with current projections, and that the current parcel tax in place through June 2025 will be renewed ahead of its expiration.
After introducing the idea of a budget advisory committee as part of the presentation on the 2024-25 budget on June 11, Kemp also pointed to steps district staff were already taking to cut costs ahead of the committee’s formation.
“Some of the things that we believe are important around the systems work is monitoring and planning, and so training our leaders on budget development and budget monitoring of their school sites, and then looking at systems that have traditionally overrun and implementing our monitoring system with those particular departments, and then having a budget process monitoring cycle and cabinet to review that and make sure everyone’s informed about where we are standing,” Kemp said.Â
She added that staff were also going to be looking toward shifting funding sources in some cases, pointing to an existing example of shifting some costs for custodial services out of the General Fund.
“One of the shifts we made was to move a portion of the lead custodian at the school sites into the routine restricted maintenance budget, because they do some school maintenance on their school sites, but they were all funded out of general fund,” Kemp said. “So we moved a portion of their salaries into that particular budget which is a required set-aside, and we’re going to monitor that to see how that’s going.”
Although the budgeting process for the 2024-25 year was almost complete as of June 11, Kemp added that staff would be looking toward any additional costs that could be cut to make expenses below budgeted projections in the current school year.
“If we can make some reductions to soften the impact into next year, that would be really helpful for us,” Kemp said.
Staffing ratios will also be evaluated, Kemp said, and moves made to “right size staffing as enrollment is below forecasted enrollment.”Â
“This kind of gets into the boundary work that we need to do next year with the Bishop Ranch community starting to come on board,” Kemp said. “We need to make sure that every school that students will matriculate into that we have the appropriate staffing and have done the boundary work to make sure that we’re not leaving one school really small while one school is getting large, so that will be work that’s happening next fall.”
In their subsequent discussion on the budget and financial outlook on June 11, some board members called for community members to seek a greater understanding of how education funding works and the challenges facing the district.
“We have the actuals here, and in order to keep qualified teachers and qualified administrators – people get raises when they do a good job,” Area 2 Trustee Shelley Clark said. “I work in private industry. If I treated my highly qualified salespeople like some people want us to treat our teachers and our administrators, I wouldn’t have anybody working for me.”
Area 1 Trustee Jesse vanZee highlighted that it was increasingly difficult to attract and retain teachers and school staff in a competitive atmosphere with other districts, as well as other factors such as advances in technology and the increasing cost to provide technological resources to students.
Another looming challenge for the district brought up at the June 11 discussion was the failure of the parcel tax measures that had been up for a special election on May 7 and failed to garner the required two-thirds approval threshold to pass. That topic returned to the table at the June 18 meeting, during which the board reviewed and discussed a presentation on the results of a pre-election planning survey.
