California schools rolling in dough, but 'scary' clouds appear on horizon - San Jose Mercury News:
California schools rolling in dough, but 'scary' clouds appear on horizon
VALLEJO -- Vallejo High School teacher Lewis Brown starts his morning government class with a question of the day that takes advantage of newly assigned iPads.
"Today is the one year anniversary of the French magazine terrorist assassination," Brown says. "What was the name of the magazine?" In seconds, 17-year-old SioFilisi Anitoni answers from the back row, "Mr. Brown, Charlie Hebdo."
Vallejo City Unified School District is hoping to improve classroom learning by using increased state funds to raise teacher salaries, open new computer labs and assign iPads to each of its roughly 1,000 high school students.
Lewis Brown, a teacher at Vallejo High School, after class, Vallejo, Calif., January 7, 2016. (Robert Durell/CALMatters) ( Robert Durell )
And the district is hardly alone. Up and down California, school districts that handed out tens of thousands of pink slips in the recession are now buying equipment and scrambling to find qualified teachers, a problem driven in part by low recruitment and high turnover. With the state's recent economic gains and a temporary tax approved by voters in 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a $71.6 billion education budget for the next fiscal year, up more than 50 percent since 2011.
But California still ranked 41st in the nation for per-pupil spending in 2013, the most recent year available. And looking ahead, educators see financial challenges that are significant enough that they hope to qualify a ballot measure this year to extend some temporary taxes.
Voters approved temporary taxes under Proposition 30 in 2012 to generate about $8 billion per year for schools. Those taxes will phase out at the end of 2018. At the same time, an agreement to pay down more than $67 billion in unfunded debt for teacher pensions is expected to consume about 38 percent of the projected growth in the school budget through 2019.
If there is a recession, as Brown has warned, budget forecasters say schools could be forced once again to lay off teachers and cut costs. "We're really cautioning districts about the outyears because it's starting to look a little scary," said longtime school lobbyist Kevin Gordon of Capitol Advisors.
The pension agreement reached by Brown and state lawmakers in 2014 is intended to eliminate the debt within 30 years. According to projections by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office, the Legislature's nonpartisan budget analyst, school districts will pay $3.1 billion more to the pension system in the 2019-20 fiscal year than they do today while the minimum school budget guaranteed by Proposition 98 is projected to be about $8.3 billion higher in that same year.
If California slips back into recession, the analyst's office warned that the pension obligations could grow faster than school budgets, likely forcing districts to cut elsewhere.
The concern about funding comes as California is implementing a set of new policies to improve academic outcomes.
The lagging performance of low-income, Latino and African-American students is stark. In the state's most recent batch of standardized tests, less than one in four low-income or Latino children and less than one in five African-American children scored high enough to be considered proficient in math. About half of white students and more than two-thirds of Asian students measured as proficient on the same test.
