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Hello everyone,
It may be near the end of the calendar year, but we’re smack-dab in the middle of the fiscal year–which we all know means it’s time for that time-honored ritual of dissecting state budget news.
As you may have heard, Governor Brown this week announced that the long-awaited and much-dreaded California “trigger cuts” would be pulled, as a result of the Department of Finance’s estimate of a $2.2 billion shortfall in annual state revenues.
The good news is that K-12 education did not suffer nearly as badly as we had feared. While community colleges, the California State University and University of California systems will lose an additional $100 million each, the hit to K-12 was about $328 million–with $248 million of that in home-to-school bus transportation, and the remaining $80 million in revenue limit funding cuts.
How will this affect us? Well, our programs in Business Services, Educational Services, Technology Services and the Office of the Superintendent all are affected; as well as Court and Community schools. However, the reduction amounts to only about one-third of one percent. Since we budgeted for cuts well in excess of that, we won’t have to make further cuts in those areas in this fiscal year.
As for busing: The transportation we provide for students with special needs is a mandated service. Therefore, even though the funding is reduced, we don’t anticipate any reduction in transportation services for the remainder of the year.
Now for the bad news (and you know when we talk budget these days, there’s always bad news). In the middle of next month, the governor will announce his proposed budget for 2012-2013. Early indications are that we should expect about a $13 billion deficit, mainly due to increased expenses in the non-school portion of the budget.
But it’s not as bad as it might be. Up to now the governor has taken a very pro-K-12 stance, and announced he’s committed to protecting education as much as possible. So, of that $13 billion, we’ve been told to expect around $2 billion in cuts to K-12 education.
Of course, these cuts are on top of a long series of cuts that schools have suffered in the past few years. It would bring the five-year total of cuts to about $20 billion. No matter how you look at it, that is a staggering sum.
Compounding these cuts are the ongoing stresses to our funding that we face with increasing health care costs. Unfortunately, we anticipate that those costs will go up yet again in the coming year. Our Health Care Cost Containment Committee is working hard to explore ways to mitigate as much as possible this ongoing and seemingly unstoppable trend.
The other troubling news is in the federal budget process. We are carefully monitoring developments in proposed federal cuts to education, and passage of a budget in Washington, D.C., to see how these actions might affect programs such as Head Start.
But all in all, I have to say that the news could have been worse. We have been through many tough times in the past few years, which have required budgeting conservatively while doing our best to maintain our crucial services to schools and students. And I’m proud to say that you all have weathered the storms with professionalism, good grace and great skill.
With that in mind, let me again extend to you my thanks, and my sincerest wishes for a safe, restful and joyous holiday season.
As always, thanks for reading.
--Chuck
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