District Budget Update - No Pink Slips in 2012

March is here and with it is the statutory deadline to decide on whether or not to issue layoff notices to school teachers and certificated staff. Every year since I have been on the Board of Trustees, our district has issued "pink slips" in order to retain flexibility as we undertake the budget development process. Last year, Berryessa School District gave out 99 pink slips. As the budget came into better focus, we were able to reinstate almost everyone on the list and avoid more severe cuts. In addition, we set aside about $250 per student in reserve in case mid-year cuts materialized during the 2011-2012 school year.

The good news is that mid-year cuts were avoided, meaning that we can roll over the reserve to next year's budget. The bad news is that the coming year's budget is even more uncertain than in the past. Despite the high degree of uncertainty and since we have the ability to cover next year's budget in the case of cuts, I am very pleased that we will, for the first time in a number of years, proceed without any layoffs this year.

This is a very risky course of action, but one that is the right thing to do, both for our employees and in order to maintain a reasonable level of service for our students. We are operating under the assumption that all of our operations, including class size, school year length, and service hours, will remain unchanged from this year to next. There will be savings due to a large number of retiring teachers at the end of this school year.

A lot of our funding stability depends on two things happening. One is that some kind of tax measure passes in the state so that education funding can remain at its current level. Secondly, we must renew our local parcel tax so that our annual income stream of $1.7 million doesn't go away. Even with those two things, the budget we are preparing is in trouble for the second year out (2013-2014). As a result, the district will be forced to submit a "qualified budget" in our second interim report.

So while I am happy that the coming school year looks like it will be status quo as far as services for our students, we must continue to remain on top of our budget and save money in every way possible. And we will continue to hope that an improving economy means that the state will once again begin investing adequately in California students.