اینترنت

برچسب: makes

  • West Contra Costa makes progress toward financial health, but big challenges remain

    West Contra Costa makes progress toward financial health, but big challenges remain


    West Contra Costa Unified’s Stege Elementary School in Richmond. (File photo 2019)

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Top Takeaways
    • West Contra Costa Unified gets out from under a cloud of possible insolvency by coming up with a budget approved by the County Office of Education, which rated it “positive.” 
    • Positive certification is conditioned on the district implementing cuts and sending layoff notices by May 15 as agreed to by the elected school board in February. 
    • The district still faces budget challenges, including negotiating a new contract with its teachers and eliminating a structural deficit in three years after it has spent all the funds in a special reserve. 

    The West Contra Costa Unified District has made substantial financial progress by balancing its budget and averting possible insolvency. 

    Last week, the Contra Costa County Office of Education notified the district that it approved a “positive certification” in the latest version of its budget for the 2024-26 school years, the second time it has done that this year.  

    Positive certification means the county office concurs with the district that it can meet its financial obligations during the current school year and the next two years, but only if it follows through on plans to cut another $13 million over the next two years. 

    “If they do everything they say they’re going to do and keep going down the path that they submitted to us, they should be OK,” said Contra Costa County Superintendent of Schools Lynn Mackey. 

    The county office’s concurrence came as a relief to district officials. Interim Superintendent Kim Moses, the district’s business manager until last year, described the positive certification as “great news.”  

    “We are able to say that we can meet our obligations over the next three years with the changes that we’ve made,” she said. “And that is something to celebrate.” 

    The latest development for the 25,000-student district in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes the city of Richmond, offers lessons for other California districts experiencing financial difficulties.   

    No. 1 among them: School boards have to make hard decisions to cut budgets and reduce the number of employees proportionate to their revenues, said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), a state-funded agency that helps school districts get out of financial difficulties.

    For several years, the county office of education had concluded that the district was no longer “a going concern” based on its shaky finances. And as recently as last year, FCMAT rated the district as at a high risk of insolvency.

    To get to the positive rating, the district cut $19.7 million from its budget this year, and its board voted in February to cut another $13 million over the next two years.  

    Going Deeper

    Under state oversight regulations, a school district’s financial situation can fall into three categories:  

    • A positive certification means the school district has the resources to meet its financial obligations to get through the current school year,and two subsequent ones.
    • A qualified certification means that the district may not to meet its financial obligations in the current school year, or the next two years.
    • A negative certification is the most dire category: a district will be unable to meet its financial obligation in the current year or subsequent school year.

    West Contra Costa’s positive rating is especially good news because, in 1991, the district became the first in California to get an emergency loan from the state, which took two decades to pay off.  

    But the district still faces substantial challenges. In its letter to Moses last Thursday, Daniela Parasidis, the county’s deputy superintendent for business services, said its approval of the district’s positive certification “comes with significant caution.” 

     “The district must remain vigilant and continue the implementation of its solvency plan to ensure long-term financial stability,” she wrote. 

    She also pointed to potential hazards that could affect the district’s finances, which underscore the multiple pressure points school districts face. In West Contra Costa, these include the impact of declining enrollment, increased absenteeism due to fears around immigration enforcement, expiring parcel tax revenue, and possible loss of federal funding cuts by the Trump administration.

    County officials say maintaining the district’s positive certification hinges on it doing two things: sending out layoff notices as the board voted to do in February by May 15, the deadline specified by state law, as well as adopting a budget for the coming school year by June 30.   

    One unknown is that the district is in the final stages of prolonged contract negotiations with unions representing all its staff, including its teachers union, which is demanding a pay increase and other compensation-related changes, and improved health benefits. The teachers’ contract expires June 30.

    However, there is deep disagreement between the district and its unions over the severity of the district’s financial difficulties. Francisco Ortiz, the president of United Teachers of Richmond, said the district routinely “underprojects revenue and overprojects expenditures.”  As for the cuts planned for the next two years, Ortiz said, “We feel that none of these cuts are necessary.” He said the district needs to, instead, “reprioritize how they’re actually spending their funds.” 

    “We deeply value our educators and agree they work hard and deserve to be fairly compensated,” Moses wrote in an online message last week. “Our challenge is not about disagreement, but about how we responsibly meet this need while ensuring our district remains fiscally sound.” 

    Another pitfall is that, despite making significant budget cuts, the district is still operating with a structural deficit, which it is closing by drawing on one-time reserve funds. 

    Those are so-called “special reserves” called Fund 17, valued at over $37 million at the beginning of the school year.  

    West Contra Costa was able to accumulate these special reserves at least in part because when it got its state bailout loan decades ago, the state required the district to maintain reserves of 6%, double the normally required amount, Moses said. 

    To balance its books, the district is drawing down $11.5 million of its Fund 17 reserves this year, another $20.25 million next year, and $6.2 million the following year, fully depleting that reserve.  It will still have the 3% minimum reserve required by the state, which amounts to about $15 million. 

    John Gray, CEO of School Services of California, the largest school consulting firm in the state, says it is quite acceptable for a district to use its Fund 17 reserves to get through a fiscal crisis. 

    But, he says, it means that “there will be a reckoning in three years” when all those funds are spent. “If you spend it (the Fund 17 reserve) all the way down,” he said, “you’re not going to have a place to grab money, and you’re going to have to make additional cuts.”

    Interim Superintendent Moses hopes that over the next two years, the district will be able to “align expenditures with our revenue so that we will no longer have a structural deficit, and we’ll begin to build back up that reserve for economic uncertainties.” 

    She said, “Any responsible, budget-minded person is going to make sure they save something for hard times.”





    Source link

  • West Contra Costa makes big push to get kids to class – and raise revenue while doing it

    West Contra Costa makes big push to get kids to class – and raise revenue while doing it


    Verde Elementary School in West Contra Costa Unified School District

    Top Takeaways
    • Raising attendance would improve student outcomes and help the district achieve a balanced budget.
    • The district will focus on boosting attendance of all students, not just those who are “chronically absent,” using a range of attendance-improvement strategies.
    • Improving attendance will require an investment of funds and offering incentives, experts say.

    To boost student attendance, the West Contra Costa Unified School District has launched a comprehensive plan to increase attendance by 2 percentage points this school year. 

    The plan will be reviewed by the school board at its meeting on Wednesday.

    The challenge is in part an educational one. If students aren’t in class, they’re far less likely to succeed. It is also a financial strategy that is crucial to the district’s attempts to fend off insolvency and a state takeover for the second time in 30 years. 

    That’s because the main source of state funding for schools in California is based not just on how many students are enrolled, but on how many students actually show up each day for class.  

    But bumping up attendance, even by a few percentage points, is not as easy as it might seem, regardless of the district.  

    So what happens in this 29,000-student district in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Richmond and several adjacent communities, also holds lessons for numerous other financially struggling districts in California and nationally. 

    According to interim Superintendent Kim Moses, the math is simple: For every 1 percentage point increase in attendance, the district can raise $2.75 million in additional state funding. 

    Raising attendance by nearly 3 percentage points would generate over $7 million — about the same amount the district is projecting it will have to reduce its budget during each of the coming two years to achieve a balanced budget. 

    “It’s the biggest lever that we have,” board President Leslie Reckler, who is fully behind the attendance strategy to avert even more cuts in programs and staff than the district has already made, said in an interview. “We get paid by who shows up.”

     Moses told the school board at a recent meeting, “If we are successful in increasing our attendance, that is a way to increase revenue. Then we can rescind the reductions we are proposing.”

    Until now, the district’s attendance improvement plan has focused on “chronically absent” students — those who miss 10% or more instructional days per year. That has yielded results, pushing overall attendance rates in the district to 92.3% last fall, just below the state average. 

    But over the last few months, attendance rates in the district have started to drift down again, to 89.5% in February, according to district figures. 

    Natalie Tovani-Walchuk, vice president of local impact for Go Public Schools, an advocacy organization working in several Bay Area school districts, including West Contra Costa, speculates that some of the decline could be related to illnesses — the flu, Covid, norovirus and RSV — that simultaneously struck the district in recent months. It could also be that some immigrant parents fear bringing their children to school because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.  

    “All of this creates conditions which you can’t control,” said Tovani-Walchuck, a former school principal born and raised in Richmond. 

    Aiming to boost attendance of all students

    After initially focusing on chronically absent students, the district is now aiming to boost the attendance of all students, and to focus on schoolwide attendance-improvement strategies, including:

    • Targeting schools with the lowest attendance and developing “individualized action plans” for those schools.
    • Expecting schools to implement activities that reinforce positive attendance habits, such as recognizing students whose attendance improves and working more closely with families “to build stronger connections between school and home.”  
    • Helping schools use a toolkit developed by the district, including prepared scripts in communicating with parents, along with “action plans” for targeting lagging attendance to promote “Stronger Together: Show Up, Rise Up,” the theme of the attendance campaign. 
    • Recruiting more parents, representatives of community-based organizations and community members to participate in the district’s Student Attendance Review Board, to which students who are repeatedly absent or truant can be referred.   

    But Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, an agency set up by the state to help districts in difficult financial straits, said, “There is a limit to how much improvement in attendance can be made.” 

    A year ago, his agency issued a report concluding that, despite financial and other improvements, West Contra Costa faced a high risk of insolvency.  

    A realistic goal, Fine said, would be to increase attendance by 1 percentage point each year over the next three years. He pointed out that the district will probably have to spend money on extra staff time and incentives to generate interest among students, parents and schools. 

    “Programs like this cost money, so you have to spend to be successful,” Fine said. 

    Fine recalls that when he was a deputy superintendent at Riverside Unified, the district persuaded local businesses to award a used car to high school seniors who achieved perfect attendance across their entire K-12 careers, or other incentives like computers and bicycles for meeting less ambitious goals. His district spent about $250,000 a year on the program, but generated $1.2 million in increased attendance revenue.  

    Increasing attendance is especially challenging because there are many reasons why students don’t show up for school, all detailed in a presentation to be considered by the board at its monthly meeting this week. These include lack of transportation, illness, parent work schedules, child care constraints, and students feeling disengaged, unsupported and bored at school, plus, in some cases, severe mental health issues. 

    As a result, any initiative to reduce absenteeism demands a range of strategies to address its underlying causes. 

    Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit organization focusing on attendance, said West Contra Costa Unified appears to be on the right track by surveying parents and identifying why individual students don’t come to school. Another plus, she said, is the district’s creation of so-called community schools, which already work with social service organizations that can also help. 

    “It looks like the district has some things in place,” she said.  But she also cautioned that schools with large numbers of low-income students, like many in West Contra Costa, will likely experience higher absenteeism rates and have to come up with multifaceted responses to overcome them. 

    Building positive relationships with parents

    The district says one school that has made notable strides is Verde Elementary, a community school serving transitional kindergarten through eighth grade students in North Richmond, an unincorporated area of the district. 

    The efforts of Martha Nieto, Verde’s “school community outreach worker,” have been central to the school’s efforts to boost attendance. 

    Nieto, a mother of six who was born in Mexico, says that a key to getting kids to school is building positive relationships with parents. Each day, the school systematically records which students are absent. Attendance clerk Patricia Martines then calls parents’ homes, sometimes with the assistance of school secretary Patricia Farias, who attended the school and still lives in the neighborhood. 

    Each Friday, Nieto  offers what she calls a “School Smarts” class for parents to learn how to get involved in the school. As for students, Nieto provides incentives to improve attendance with modest gifts like a soccer ball, or free ice cream or nachos, which she also hands out on Friday mornings. Students with perfect attendance are awarded medals at “Celebration of Learning” events held regularly in the school cafeteria. 

    The challenge, Go Public Schools’ Tovani-Walchuk says, is to extend efforts like these across the entire district. 

    “These are moments of real strength, and we’re seeing what is truly possible,” she said, referring to Verde Elementary. “But it has not been yet systematized where every school has their school community outreach worker doing this work. That’s really determined site by site, depending on its priorities.”

    Verde Elementary school secretary Victoria Farías, who attended the school as a student, assists with keeping track of attendance.
    Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource

    School board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy says that in addition to boosting the attendance of existing students, there needs to be more emphasis on attracting new ones to the district. That’s because the district’s financial plight is largely due to student enrollment that has declined by an average of 3.1 percentage points over the previous four years, according to the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team report. 

    “It has to be a two-pronged approach,” he said. “We need to get families moving into our community to come to our schools. We don’t want to be a place where we have to be closing schools.”

    “If we want to continue to thrive as a district, we have no other option,” he said. 





    Source link