Pressure-cooker meetings have come with school districts’ budgeting freedom
For decades, schools in California had their spending basically laid out for them by the state. A makeover in school funding has freed district spending from those controls, and those fail-safes. Local control counts on communities tuning in and speaking up.
Money for classroom teachers, janitors and district office administrators came in the biggest pot. Another little wallet held money for textbooks – just for textbooks. Money for school buses went into another pocket, just for transportation. Legislators wanted children to have music lessons, so another envelope full of money came just for arts instruction and instruments.
There were 57 separate wallets for state set-asides, from gang-risk intervention to readers for blind teachers. Predetermined spending took up 40 percent of the budget.
You see the thinking here. Everything legislators wanted to be sure happened, they set aside in a special, restricted purse that could not get lost in the big pot of employee salaries and overhead. Bargaining came down to a question of lower class sizes (more teachers) or higher pay, more aides or more administrators.
Creating the budget each year mostly happened in the business office, using a massive accounting program that tracked every dime in up to 233 separate fields for state and federal funding programs. When the state passed its budget, agile fingers flew in the finance department, cranking out a budget that in large part was a done deal.
School boards made decisions within the categories, such as which textbooks to buy and which grades would have bands or singing lessons. They had final say on the balancing act in salaries and class size. But for the most part, there was no budging the budget numbers. The system got more cumbersome and carved up every year, until the Great Recession forced talk of reform.
Then, with the punch of a ballot in 2012, Proposition 30 ushered in an era of local control. Gone were almost all of the categories. Gone was the loose change rattling around in not-Pressure-cooker meetings have come with school districts’ budgeting freedom | The Modesto Bee: