Shoreline Unified’s elected Board of Trustees is still desperately grappling with how to fix an unbalanced school budget that has plagued the board since it was revealed during the summer that the district is running in the red.
At last Thursday’s monthly meeting at Tomales Elementary School, the board voted to approve an updated interim budget that estimated the district will be spending $586,115 more than it receives by the beginning of the 2016-17 school year. The latest budget figures were drafted by chief business officer Susan Skipp, who will be vacating her position in January.
“We’ve brought expenditures way down, but it’s still deficit spending,” Ms. Skippp said. “Even with the layoffs, we’ll still have a deficit structure. It just buys the district a few more years.”
Before the vote to approve the budget could even be tallied, there was controversy.
Trustees voted to approve Ms. Skipp’s new budget estimates, but only if they didn’t have to pay a $20,000 sewer bill to the Tomales Village Community Services District, with which it has held a contract for decades.
“I motion to approve the budget, pending that we direct Susan not to pay for this sewer bill,” said Jim Lino, who was among several trustees who took issue with the sewer district for charging depreciation on old equipment.
And so began a series of heated discussions over how much money—none of which the board realistically has—should or shouldn’t be spent going into the second half of the school year.
Of the many subjects discussed on Thursday, none was more contentious than the board’s complimentary health benefits.
Trustee benefits
These benefits—including dental, vision, life and a Kaiser health insurance plan—cost the district this year a total of nearly $45,000. Many in the Shoreline community, including several board members, have long debated whether board members should hang onto their benefits at a time when the district’s teachers and staff are being slated for layoffs.
“This is a big part of our budget,” said Jill Manning-Sartori, the board’s vice president. “And it is one way we can reduce expenditures without impacting student achievement.”
At Thursday’s meeting, Superintendent Tom Stubbs read an email sent by Robert Henry—an attorney frequently used by the district for legal consult—and clarified a question that has lingered throughout the budget debate: does the board have legal authority to require its members to give up their own benefits?
The answer, according to Mr. Henry, is no.
The board does not have the authority to unilaterally prohibit current members from receiving the benefits that they already enjoy, the email stated; however, the board does have power to change its policy regarding future members.
Several board members, including President Jane Healy, took issue with any potential decision to end its members’ Kaiser health benefits.
“If you limit [the board] to people who are economically able, you’ll sideline people like me,” said Ms. Healy, who at the start of Thursday’s meeting presented the six other board members with Christmas-gift bags of coffee from her Tomales business, Coast Roast Coffee. “We have an economically diverse district, and I don’t think [eliminating benefits] is a good direction for this board. We should include everybody.”
So far, only Ms. Sartori has volunteered to give up nearly $8,000 worth of her district-granted benefits. She joins a shortlist of members who do not receive a Kaiser plan, along with trustees Tim Kehoe and Jim Lino, both of whom were elected to the board before it was offered. The remaining four members have yet to make similar commitments.
“If I give up my board benefits, I want to be damn sure that it goes to a program that will help a kid,” said board member Monique Moretti, who still retains her benefits.
Although a substantial sum, many in the district view trustee benefit costs as merely a drop in the budget bucket. The real impact, they say, could be a symbolic show of solidarity, but that would depend on all members voluntarily agreeing to give up their health plans.
“We’re all in this together,” said Linda Borello, an administrative assistant at West Marin School and the president of the California School Employees Association’s Chapter 304. “I feel it would speak volumes that if we’re going to cut staff and teachers, it would make a statement for board members to say, ‘I need to feel the pain too.’”
Ultimately, the board did not decide anything about its members’ health benefits. The meeting’s agenda then turned to another difficult subject: staffing.
Layoffs
Since the 1960s—when the National Park Service purchased large tracts of property and used it to establish Point Reyes National Seashore—the district has been receiving federal dollars to offset a huge loss in property-tax revenue. This money has been delivered through irregular payment schedules for many years. In 2007-08, for instance, the district received $872,928 from the government, whereas in 2012-13 that amount mushroomed to $3.9 million.
“That’s what kind of created the day of reckoning, so to speak,” said Ms. Skipp, who will be replaced next month by Bruce Abbott, the former business manager of Lagunitas School District. “When you’re getting $4 million a year, it masks what you’re real situation is because you have a huge influx of money.”
“It’s really a crazy way to try and budget for a school district when you don’t know what’s coming,” Ms. Skipp said.
Under the impression that there was enough money in the budget, Shoreline’s board hired new staff in 2013-14 to fill several open positions that the district can no longer afford. In response, the Marin County Office of Education directed the district to adopt a resolution to layoff over a dozen staff by next May—or risk a county takeover of the district.
On Thursday, trustees approved a retirement incentives package designed to avoid layoffs by encouraging older staff to retire. The board called this package a Memorandum of Understanding.
Interested staff will have the option to take either a $30,000 cash payment or a “golden handshake” that will credit the retiree two extra years under the state’s CalSTRS retirement benefits. However, the catch is that at least five people will have to sign up for the package by Jan. 30, or the deal is off.
The memorandum also only applies to certificated staff. The board has yet to offer any official incentives package for classified staff— food, maintenance, transportation, clerical—and the California School Employees Association is not happy about it.
“We were told we would have an offer in writing that we could take to the members so that they could think about it over the Christmas break,” said Ms. Borello, whose union represents classified staff in the district. “We never were able to get that information to our members, and we haven’t received an official offer to share with them so that they could think about it.”
Meanwhile, an item deep into Thursday’s agenda caused another stir: a proposal to hire an additional special education instructional assistant for a single student at West Marin School.
According to Mr. Stubbs, a special needs aide hired over the summer “did not work out.” The position had to be filled, Mr. Stubbs said, because a one-on-one aide was called for in the student’s Individualized Education Program, for which state code mandates that school districts must fulfill any and all demands.
“This would be an example of attrition,” said Mr. Lino. “The hard part is that this is a person who has special needs. So I’m conflicted.”
Attendees at the meeting reassured Mr. Lino that the decision to hire this additional staff—when cuts are so assiduously being sought—would be acceptable, given the student’s need for immediate support.
Nonetheless, even with projected layoffs, the school district’s budget will still have a deficit balance unless more staff are laid off by next year.
The budget
Many at Thursday’s meeting were shocked to find out that, on paper, it actually looked like deficit spending had increased by about $450,000 since September. To assuage their outcries, Ms. Skipp spent a great deal of time explaining how certain funds carry over from one budget cycle to the next, sometimes showing up as expenditures and sometimes not.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ms. Skipp said. “It’s an oddity in school finance, and it’s difficult to understand.”
One specific kind of “carryover” raised eyebrows at the meeting: a fund to pay for instructional materials, which costs the district over $63,000 annually. Audience and board members alike wondered if this money could be transferred into the general fund to help offset layoffs.
“I have a hard time when I see this money sitting on the table when we’ve been discussing layoffs,” Ms. Moretti said. “It’s a lot of money carried over year after year. It kind of rubs me in an interesting way.”
Ms. Skipp said freeing up carryover monies for the general fund would not put much of a dent in the deficit, since most of them are one-time donations. Others agreed with Ms. Skipp, and affirmed that the materials carryover should be spent to buy teaching resources like iPads.
Every student at West Marin School has an iPad and now, as part of new Common Core standards, students are required to take the Smarter Balanced Assessment test on some form of advanced technology.
“If we need 20 iPads, then we need to decide which funds to use to purchase them,” said Matt Nagle, the principal at West Marin School. “That is absolutely a requirement.”
Even so, some at Thursday’s meeting opposed this kind of dependence on technology in classrooms. “I would argue that technology and textbooks won’t be doing the actual teaching,” said trustee Kegan Stedwell, receiving a round of applause.