SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The union representing Sacramento City Schools teachers is criticizing the district for ending its 2019-2020 school year with a $23-million budget surplus after projecting a $12-million deficit.
Superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) Jorge Aguilar says those one-time savings are attributed to the coronavirus pandemic.
SCUSD closed all of its schools and went to an all-virtual learning model last March. Tara Gallegos, a SCUSD spokesperson, said with students out the classroom, the district saved around 4% of its overall budget on school buses that weren’t running, lower utility bills at schools, no field trips, and maintenance items. The district also stopped hiring some positions and delayed the purchase of nearly $5 million in textbooks.
“We are anticipating that all of those savings that we achieved because of the pandemic are going to become expenditures as soon as we return,” Aguilar said. “And have the obligations that will be in the form of budget expenditures to meet the needs of our students.”
David Fisher is President of the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA), the nearly 2,500 member union representing Sacramento’s teachers and other education professionals. The SCTA is criticizing the district for projecting a budget deficit but ending their budget years with a surplus.
“Parents, teachers, and business leaders have been bombarded with ‘sky is falling in’ messages coming out of the budget office that is parroted by both the school board and the Sacramento County Office of Education year after year,” Fisher said. “Every year SCUSD goes through this exercise of telling the public that it is running out of cash and better cut programs, only to end with ‘never mind, we actually ran a surplus.'”
The SCTA says those resources should be redirected to employ school nurses, reduce class sizes, and to improve special education services.
“With a surplus of $23 million from last school year and a reserve fund that now exceeds $93 million, it’s time to focus on the positive and determine how we can best redirect those resources back to the classroom,” said Fisher. “Especially now, with the added educational challenges that the pandemic brings. We need to employ more school nurses, lower class sizes, improve special education services, and provide help so that our teachers can tailor virtual learning to the needs of each student.”
The SCUSD is facing financial insolvency, according to a 2019 California State Auditors report. The report found that the district failed to take “sufficient” action to control its costs in several areas including teacher salaries, employee benefits, and special education.
“Sacramento Unified increased its spending by $31 million annually when it approved a new labor contract with its teachers union in 2017,” the state auditors report wrote. “Despite warnings from the Sacramento County Office of Education that it could not afford the agreement, the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Education approved the agreement without a plan for how it would pay for it.”
The Superintendent for the Sacramento County Office of Education, David Gordon, says the district must continue to take cost-saving measures to avoid insolvency.
At a virtual SCUSD school board meeting Thursday, Sept. 17, the district's Chief Business Officer Rose Ramos presented a report regarding the district's 2019-2020 budget.
However, parents continue to direct their written concerns over the current school year’s distance learning plans, which have yet to be finalized. SCUSD officials and the teachers union continue to argue over the matter.
Efforts to resolve the ongoing feud could not be resolved even through state-appointed mediation. State officials will enter a legal process during collective bargaining called “fact finding.” Independent state officials will make recommendations at the end of that process for how the educators should move forward.
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