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Board leaders at the San Ramon Valley Unified School District were the only Tri-Valley signatories so far in an open letter from a number of Bay Area school officials last week calling for an “urgent state funding overhaul.”
SRVUSD Board of Education President Susanna Ordway and Vice President Jesse vanZee added their names to the formal letter submitted to legislators on the state’s budget and education committees March 24, along with their counterparts from school districts in Fremont, West Contra Costa, Antioch, Oakland, San Francisco, and the East Side Union High School District in San Jose.
“The current state funding model is no longer compatible with the economic realities of the Bay Area or the shifting needs of our students,” Ordway said in a press release from the district Tuesday. “While we have been proactive and disciplined in our local fiscal management, state-level reform is needed to protect the high-quality education our community expects, and our students deserve.”
District officials pointed to “proactive steps” that SRVUSD has taken in order to maintain fiscal solvency in the face of “volatile state funding” that has led to tough choices, including $37.5 million in budget cuts over the past three years and a revenue enhancement plan that includes the recent purchase of a new building in San Ramon, with the goal of generating lease revenue and selling off the current district offices at 699 Old Orchard Road in Danville.
Regardless of those measures, officials pointed to issues with the state funding model for education and its failure to account for the combination of a high cost of living and declining enrollment projections throughout the Bay Area.
“Today, SRVUSD stands united with Bay Area districts in demanding that Sacramento finally address a broken funding system,” vanZee said. “Our students in San Ramon Valley—and across California—cannot wait any longer while the state relies on outdated formulas that ignore both our high cost of living and the reality of declining enrollment.”
That sentiment is echoed in the letter from Bay Area school districts, pointing to “common fiscal challenges” throughout the region that officials say the state funding model fails to account for.
“These cannot be fixed only at the local level because they are caused by systemic misalignments at the state level,” Bay Area school officials said in the open letter to state senators. “In the 4th largest economy in the world, it is unacceptable that the proposed budget is balanced on the backs of children.”
Specifically, local school officials are asking the state senate to reject a budget balancing proposal that would withhold $5.6 billion in Prop. 98 funds and to adopt regional cost of living calculations rather than a state estimate, as well as fully funding special education and working to transition to an enrollment based funding model rather than average daily attendance (ADA).
They noted that the ADA funding model “has been abandoned in all but six states,” with California, Idaho, Kentucky, Texas, Mississippi and Missouri being the only ones that continue to use that funding model.
“We are reducing expenditures, restructuring programs, and tightening budgets,” Bay Area school officials said in the letter. “However, local discipline cannot correct systemic state shortcomings. When numerous districts across California are simultaneously in fiscal distress, it is not coincidence–it is evidence that the system must be reformed. We stand ready to partner with you in protecting our students’ futures.”
