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  • Newsom’s $8 billion fix to spare cuts to schools, community colleges may face tough sell

    Newsom’s $8 billion fix to spare cuts to schools, community colleges may face tough sell


    Gov. Gavin Newsom announces his 2024-25 state budget proposal, including his plans to deal with a projected deficit in Sacramento on Jan. 10.. Credit: Brontë Wittpenn / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris

    Gov. Gavin Newsom buoyed the hopes of school district and community college educators this month when, despite a sizable three-year decline in state revenue, he promised to protect schools and colleges from cuts and to uphold future spending commitments.

    They might want to hold their applause until after the last act, when the Legislature passes the 2024-25 budget in June.

    In an analysis of the state budget, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) cautioned that there are questions about how Newsom plans to close $8 billion of a huge revenue shortfall facing schools and community colleges.

    Beyond meeting this challenge, the LAO also urged legislators to start planning for education spending beyond 2024-25, when flat or declining revenues are expected to raise difficult financial choices. They could pit funding of ongoing expenses against sustaining ambitious programs like summer and after-school programs for low-income students, additional community schools, money for teacher training in early literacy and math, and confronting post-pandemic learning setbacks.

    “The state faces significant operating deficits in the coming years, which are the result of lower revenue estimates, as well as increased cost pressures,” the analyst said.

    But the immediate enigma is Newsom’s strategy for the $8 billion.

    Newsom is projecting that state revenues to run schools and community colleges will be short $14.3 billion over three years: the budget year that ended in 2022-23, the current budget year of 2023-24, and the coming year. That number is calculated as revenue through Proposition 98, the formula that determines the proportion of the state’s general fund that must be spent on schools and community colleges — about 40%.

    Proposition 98 revenues are sometimes close but never exactly what a governor and the Legislature assume when they approve a budget. Revenues for the past and current years exceed or fall short of what they projected and not what they predict for the year ahead.  

    Budget analysts were particularly handicapped when calculating the 2023-24 budget. They didn’t anticipate the shortfall from 2022-23 and didn’t discover it until fall 2023, because of a six-month delay in the filing deadline for 2022 tax returns.

    Newsom is proposing to divert $5.7 billion from the Proposition 98 rainy day fund to fill in the current year’s deficit as well as what’s needed to sustain a flat budget, plus a small cost of living increase, for 2024-25. Draining the rainy day fund would require the Legislature’s OK.

    The remainder — and biggest piece — is the $9 billion revenue shortfall from 2022-23, which would be $8 billion after other automatic adjustments. That shortfall is technically an overpayment beyond the statutory minimum Proposition 98 funding guarantee. It fell dramatically from what the Legislature adopted in June 2022 to $98.3 billion that revenue actually produced. The biggest decline was in income tax receipts on the top 1% of earners.

    School districts have already spent funding from 2022–23, including on staff pay raises that they negotiated with good faith estimates. Newsom and the Legislature could try to deduct that overpayment from the current and 2024-25 budgets, but such a move “would be devastating for students and staff,” Patti Herrera, vice president of the school consulting firm California School Services, told a workshop last week with more than 1,000 school district administrators in Sacramento.

    As an alternative, Newsom proposes to find reductions from the non-Proposition 98 side of the general fund, which covers higher education, child care and all other non-education expenses, from prisons to climate change programs.

    “We are super grateful there will be no attempts to claw back” the money given to school districts in a past year’s budget, Herrera said.

    Newsom’s challenge is to make districts and community colleges financially whole without increasing the minimum Proposition 98 guarantee. Raising Proposition 98 could create a bigger obligation in the future, including potential deficits after 2024-25 — unless the Legislature raises taxes, a nonstarter in an election year.

    How Newsom is going to do this is a mystery. The one-sentence reference to it in his budget summary says only, “The Budget proposes statutory changes to address roughly $8 billion of this decrease to avoid impacting existing LEA (school districts) and community college district budgets.”

    Both the LAO and School Services said it’s their understanding from the Department of Finance that the payments from the general fund to cover the Proposition 98 overpayment would be made over five years, starting in 2025-26.

    “We have some questions about that proposal. Probably the most pressing one is how is the state going to use revenue that it’s not going to collect for several years to address a funding shortfall that exists right now,” said Ken Kapphahn, the LAO’s principal fiscal and policy analyst for TK-12 education.

    The questions are legal and political. The proposed statutory language, which may be released in a trailer bill in the coming weeks, will reveal how the state Department of Finance will finesse postponing balancing the 2022-23 budget that’s $8 billion out of kilter. Budget hearings next week in the Capitol may indicate how receptive legislative leaders are to further reducing general fund spending, which also is feeling a financial squeeze.

    A search for the extra $8 billion

    Additionally, Newsom is proposing several billion dollars of accounting maneuvers that will book spending in 2024-25 but delay and defer payments for programs and some state salaries until early 2025-26.  Included are $500 million in deferred reimbursements to the University of California and California State University for the 5% budget increase that Newsom committed to funding in 2024-25.

    “Many of these solutions involve moving costs to next year. That is one reason we have the state looking at a large deficit, not just this year, but the following year,” Kapphahn said. “I can’t recall another situation quite like this.”

    Barring a recession, which neither LAO nor the Newsom administration is forecasting, both Newsom and the administration are projecting general fund deficits averaging about $30 billion annually in the three years after 2024-25. Pushing the $8 billion solution for the 2022-23 Proposition 98 deficit, along with other general fund delays and deferrals into those years will compound difficult choices, according to the LAO.

    “Overall, the governor’s budget runs the risk of understating the degree of fiscal pressure facing the state in the future,” the LAO analysis said.

    The LAO suggested other options for resolving the 2022-23 deficit. It recommended applying the remaining $3.8 billion from the Proposition 98 reserve fund that Newsom hasn’t touched and looking for reductions in unallocated one-time funding such as an unused $1 billion for community schools and canceling $500 million for electric school buses. 

    Even with no cuts to Proposition 98 next year, many school districts and charter schools will likely face their own deficits in 2024-25. That’s because the projected cost-of-living adjustment for next year will not be enough to cover the loss of revenue from declining enrollments. The COLA, tied to a federal formula measuring goods and services bought by state and local governments and not consumer products, is currently projected to be 0.76%; it would be the lowest increase in 40 years, with one exception, the year after the Great Recession, in 2009. This would come on the heels of two years of near record-high COLAs of 6.6% and 8.2%.

    The analyst’s office projects the COLA may inch up to 1% by June, when the budget is set. At that rate, a hypothetical school district with 10,000 students would see declining revenues with an enrollment decline of only about 100 students.

    Paso Robles Joint Unified School District in San Luis Obispo County, with about 6,000 students, is among those with declining enrollment since the pandemic. As a result, the district, with about 800 full-time employees, anticipates a reduction of five full-time staff members in 2024-25 and perhaps 40 layoff notices the following year, said Brad Pawlowski, the assistant superintendent for business services.

    Pawlowski said he came away encouraged after School Services’ presentation that schools will be spared cuts in the next budget, while acknowledging it’s a long time between now and the budget’s adoption.

    “We have seen a common message between the governor and the Legislature to protect education. And that does make me feel good,” he said. But doing so, he added, “will mean finding other ways to make that up outside of Prop. 98. That’s going to be the real challenge.”





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  • Going police-free is tough and ongoing, Oakland schools find

    Going police-free is tough and ongoing, Oakland schools find


    Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, stops a student while they are walking to class and asks how their day is going.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Across the Oakland Unified School District, the mantra for school staff is to call city police only as a last resort. If a disturbance occurs, they should rely first on in-house staff who don’t carry guns and can’t arrest anyone.

    Since voting in June 2020 to disband its police department, Oakland has pursued one goal — to defuse conflict and avoid bringing in police and exposing students to the possibility of arrest. Oakland’s preference is for restorative justice, which emphasizes circle-of-trust interactions to improve how students treat one another. 

    “Most of the time, it’s just having conversations with them (students),” said Eddie Franklin, a former security guard who is now part of the district’s new police-free staffing. “Let them authentically be themselves, and the goal becomes to chip away at the rough edges they might have.”

    It’s a strategy credited by the district with drastically reducing the 911 calls to city police from 2,128 during the 2019-20 school year, the last year the Oakland district had its own police department, to 200 in 2022-23.  

    But an EdSource analysis of data from the police shows a higher number of calls from just eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools in half a year. The period from January to June 2023 shows those schools made 225 calls, with 105 considered “serious” for reasons including assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.

    The Oakland data was part of a statewide investigation of school policing across California. EdSource gathered nearly 46,000 police logs of calls from and about 852 schools.  The data collection was designed as a representative sample of California schools.

    Police track all calls from and about eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools, while the district’s data captures calls made to police from all 106 schools.

    Misha Karigaca, Oakland Unified’s director of student support and safety, could not fully reconcile the differences between the police call logs and the district’s record of internal calls to police for the same time period.

    “If a 911 call comes from a cell phone and the call doesn’t get reported to my department, we will not have information about the call which can also account for significant discrepancies,” he said.

    Karigaca and Board President Sam Davis acknowledged that while staff are trained when not to call 911 and to report any calls that they make, it doesn’t always happen. “We don’t capture every call in our data as (school) sites are required to notify us if law enforcement comes on campus; but we know of times when this hasn’t always happened,” Karigaca said.

    Davis said it’s also possible other staff are calling 911 for nonemergent reasons because “a lot of people reach the end of their rope for all sorts of reasons.”

    The Oakland schools included in EdSource’s data are McClymonds, Castlemont, Fremont, Oakland, Skyline high schools and Montera, West Oakland and Westlake middle schools.

    “We’re not in a place where we can have completely police-free schools. That is our goal and what we’re working towards, but unfortunately, there are times when we do need police support,” Karigaca said. “It was our conditioning, whatever we needed they (police) would respond. It’s almost similar to our communities and our society — there’s not many other options. Anything that revolves around safety, we’re conditioned to call police.”

    In place for two school years, the new police-free plan is being evaluated locally and nationally on whether it is achieving what it set out to do.

    The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, in describing its study, put Oakland on the “leading edge of an emerging violence-reduction practice” happening in schools across the country, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the institute. Study results are expected in August.

    Not everyone supports the decision to disband the district’s police department.

    Board member Clifford Thompson said it was wrong for Oakland to disband its police department. “There’s little benefit to not having police at schools,” he said. “Totally eliminating the force without having a backup for those who need that type of force, it might not have been the best thing to do.”

    Getting to police-free

    The Black Organizing Project, a Bay Area community organization focused on racial, social and economic justice, has been advocating for the end of the police department since 2011. It finally happened in June 2020 with a unanimous vote of the school board.

    Oakland has had a fraught and violent history of racism and police abuse of Black people for nearly 80 years, which factored greatly into the final push to disband the department following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.

    The city’s Black population increased dramatically during World War II when slave descendants migrated west from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Police officers from those states were quickly recruited and stationed in Black neighborhoods. In 1950, a civil rights leader told the state Assembly that Black people lived “in daily and nightly terror” of Oakland police, according to a 1950 State Assembly report. The police department in Oakland Unified was born in 1957.

    After more than 60 years of having an embedded police department in Oakland schools, educators, city officials and community partners are working to untangle the decades of policing culture and running its own police department.

    There’s no contract or memorandum of understanding with the Oakland Police Department, but the district shares what staff are taught about when to call 911 and how to interact with police. 

    Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention recently reported to a joint council-district committee on the plan’s progress. The city of Oakland invested $2.4 million in the 2022-23 school year to address violence in schools by creating a School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and hiring life coaches, violence interrupters and gender-based violence specialists to four comprehensive high schools and three continuation high schools. 

    Gender-based violence specialists are unique to Oakland, Jannetta said. The specialists have workshops about dating violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation.

    Through surveys, officials found these extra staffers have more relatability to students, can focus on individual needs, and alleviate some of this work from teachers.

    It’s too early to evaluate whether it is working, but the district is going in a positive direction, said Jessica Black, director of administration for the Black Organizing Project.

    Getting to a police-free school environment also faces challenges. City and school officials say violence especially among 14 to 18-year-olds in the city bleeds into the school district. 

    During the 2022-23 school year, there were more than 600 high school suspensions and two shootings at OUSD high schools, according to the report. One of last year’s shootings was at Skyline High School, and just last month, another shooting occurred during the high school’s graduation that injured three people.

    The city’s analysis of school violence puts some of the blame on the heightened crime in the city. According to the report, there’s been an increase in violence on campuses “that is related to community conflicts as well as an increase in instances of non-students showing up at school campuses with weapons to fight students.”

    Despite the challenges, the school board has not considered reinstating the district’s police department, Davis confirmed. Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell declined to comment through a district spokesperson.

    When to call police

    One of the Black Organizing Project’s goals was to “uproot the security structure,” said Jasmine Williams, development director. With community support, the project pushed to restructure campus police, including getting rid of badges or anything that emulates the police and installing new titles, training, and redesigning the shirts they wear.

    “The district is not coming up with this stuff on their own,” the project’s Jessica Black said. “We’re literally pushing the district to think differently.”

    Oakland administrators can call for “nonviolent de-escalation support” from staff known as culture and climate ambassadors when there are fights, a student is causing harm to themselves or others, or unwelcome visitors are on campuses, according to the School Administrator Guidance to Police Free Response. There’s a nonemergency line administrators can call to dispose of firearms or illegal drugs, when there’s suspicion of a crime, or during lockdowns. For mental health crises, administrators also have different people to reach out to depending on the situation. 

    Students can still be disciplined, including suspended, but that’s rarely the first option, Karigaca said. Most of the time, interventions take place.

    “It’s offering a conduit of other opportunities, such as a restorative session, once both parties are in a place to have a restorative session,” Karigaca said. “Sometimes it’s going to take a walk or going to a different office; sometimes it’s calling parents or connecting with a community resource.”

    District police-free guidelines give a variety of reasons when calling 911 is appropriate: active shooters, fire, medical emergencies, a person with a gun or explosive, bomb threats, serious injuries, hostage situations, abduction or kidnapping, violent crimes, death at a school site, emergency evacuations, or any situation posing danger to health or safety. 

    Students can be arrested for some of these incidents, Karigaca said, but usually students aren’t arrested as a result of staff calling 911. There are about four to five arrests every school year, and it’s typically because police are arresting students for something they did outside of school, he said.

    The district partners with organizations for alternative support, but sometimes they can’t immediately respond, Karigaca said. 

    “When we call CPS (Child Protective Services) or any other mental health crisis response folks, a lot of times their staff is also under-resourced and they aren’t able to respond,” Karigaca said. “Even they will tell us, ‘Call law enforcement.’”

    New titles for security guards

    As Eddie Franklin walked down the hallway of Bret Harte Middle School, it was as if every student knew who he was. Most would fist pump him or shake his hand and he knew every student’s name. 

    Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, shakes a student’s hand while walking down the hallway.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Franklin has been at OUSD for seven years and used to be a security guard who worked with police and used handcuffs for detaining students. He became a culture keeper four years ago. Now he’s what’s called a culture and climate ambassador.

    Franklin said he brings “an unbiased approach” to every situation even if the student is acting negatively. “Your goal is to actually make them (students) see and critically think about what’s in the best interest of both sides.”

    Security guards were replaced with culture keepers and culture and climate ambassador who have leadership roles and assist culture keepers when needed, Karigaca said. The main priorities for all roles are to de-escalate violence and create positive relationships with students and staff.

    The 63 culture keepers are spread around the district: up to three in middle schools; up to six in most high schools. Five elementary schools also have culture keepers. 

    When Franklin was a culture keeper, he said his day-to-day work evolved into understanding the different personalities on campus to get a better understanding of student behavior.

    “So you don’t overreact when they do some of the things they do,” Franklin said. “But also try to give them an idea of what they can do differently.”

    As a culture and climate ambassador, Franklin is deployed to different schools when extra support is needed, Karigaca said. Most of the time, they roam around different schools building relationships.

    Franklin said he oversees 13 middle schools and does check-ins with staff to talk about what kind of support they need. A big part is building trust, he said.

    When Franklin goes to a school, he said, his goal is “to act like a parent, a positive parent, let them know I actually care about you and support you in whatever you do, and I’m not going to be over the top if I react to something that you did negative.”

    To other districts looking at Oakland as an example, Williams, of the Black Organizing Project, said she doesn’t want the message to be “all you have to do is implement a policy.”

    “It took us 10 years of fighting to get here, and we are still fighting within the district,” Williams said. “It takes community to have even this much progress.”

    EdSource reporters Thomas Peele; Daniel J. Willis and Andrew Reed contributed to this report.





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  • When districts face the tough job of closing schools, Manny Barbara is the go-to guy

    When districts face the tough job of closing schools, Manny Barbara is the go-to guy


    Manny Barbara, right, and new Alum Rock Superintendent. German Cerda discuss plans to transition the district to fewer schools.

    Credit: John Fensterwald/EdSource

    Takeaways From Manny Barbara’s school-closure playbook:
    • Allow plenty of time; let the closure process play itself out.
    • Create a fully representative advisory committee without board members, and protect confidential discussions.
    • Celebrate the closure of a school with a community event.
    • Principals must take the lead to welcome parents, students and staffs to their new schools.

    Alum Rock Union Elementary District in East San Jose was out of time. By last fall, it had spent down most its savings; enrollment, more than 16,000 K-8 students in the early 2000s, had dropped to 7,300 and was headed to under 6,000.

    The state was threatening to take it over.

    With more than two-thirds of its 21 schools at less than 50% capacity, the school board faced what it had long delayed: downsizing. It turned to Manny Barbara, the closer. 

    Alum Rock would be the sixth school district in the San Jose area that Barbara had advised on closing schools in the two decades since, as superintendent, he had shuttered two schools in nearby Oak Grove. A former school psychologist, Barbara was well-respected, affable and a good listener. He also had a plan for closing schools.

    Having fired its last superintendent, the Alum Rock board hired Barbara in the summer of 2024 as interim superintendent to lay the groundwork in the community for likely closures. He switched roles to facilitator when the new superintendent, German Cerda, took over in September.

    Between 2019-20 and 2023-24, 222 elementary, middle, and high schools in California closed, according to the state. Along with the five that Alum Rock will close in the fall and additional consolidations of four schools, there will be many more statewide, with tighter budgets ahead and state enrollment projected to decline further.

    Barbara discusses his template for closing schools and how it worked in Alum Rock in an interview with EdSource. The interview was shortened and edited for clarity.

    It’s April; suppose you’re a school board planning to close some schools this fall. What would you say about the timing?

    It’s too late because you need time for the process.

    There are three phases in school closure. The first is the preparation, informing the board, making the case why it has to be done.

    Then the actual process itself: That involves engaging the community through a committee process and taking the recommendation to the board.

    And then, once the board makes a decision, the third phase, which is just as challenging, is the transition to fewer schools.

    At Oak Grove, we started a year in advance — meeting with community, explaining the rationale, presenting the information to the board. Once you begin, you need to be done around February so that you’ve got the last few months for the transition and closure.

    What are the factors to consider when deciding whether to close?

    It’s an economic decision. You don’t want to do this unless you absolutely have to. With Alum Rock, there was a potential receivership.

    It’s also a psychological experience — emotional for the people involved. Parents, staff, students do not want their school closed. I don’t blame them. They get angry. You have to be prepared for that. You can’t convince people with sheer logic.

    Finally, it’s a political process. Elected boards are vulnerable. Parents can make threats of recall.

    What are the factors to address even before you begin the process?

    Context is important. No two districts are alike. The size of the district matters, the number of schools you have to close, the political climate in the district, the stability of the board, superintendent experience. All should be taken into account.

    Employee unions have to be informed. I never expect the associations to support school closures. The associations in Alum Rock’s case weren’t thrilled about it. My expectation is that only if they say they understand the situation, then at least they don’t tell you one thing privately and then publicly say something different.

    Goal for savings: $1 million per school

    So how much would you expect to save from closing a school?

    Close to a million dollars from the savings in administration, support staff, energy costs and so forth. That does not count any revenue that might be received from leasing the school or selling a site, which could bring in tens of millions of dollars.

    When you consolidate two schools, for example, with 300 students per school, you only need one principal, not two.

    In Oak Grove, we were able to do it through retirements. That’s not always possible.

    What’s the role of the superintendent?

    It’s critical. The superintendent has to be front and center. It’s ultimately the board’s decision, but the superintendent needs to be the key communicator and take as much of the heat as possible.

    Is it wise for districts to consider a facilitator?

    I would not recommend that superintendents do it on their own. With a facilitator, a superintendent can observe.  A superintendent has to be out there communicating with behind-the-scenes meetings, listening to people, hearing their concerns, and explaining why it has to be done. You always should be focusing on what’s best for all the students in the district.

    You’re really selling hope that, at the end of the day, the district will come out better in terms of serving all the students. There’ll be more resources available for students and compensation for employee groups.

    I remember a meeting — it was close to 11 p.m. with 100 parents. I made a comment, “Look, if there’s anything I could do to avoid closing the school, I would do it.” Then I caught myself and said, “Well, no. There is something a lot worse: if I have to lay off a lot of staff that support other students in the district to keep open a small school.”

    Who should be on an advisory committee?

    Representatives from every school, all the employee groups, the administration, community groups like neighborhood associations. The one in Alum Rock was particularly challenging, with about 30 people.

    Who chooses them?

    Schools choose their own. The parents apply, and the principal selects. Unions choose their own representation.

    But no board members?

    No board members. The reason is that I don’t want the board members to get too involved because they’re going to be involved in making the final decision. It’s up to them — they can do what they want to do.  I did not encourage them to attend the committee meetings as observers, and they did not.

    As an advisory committee, their meetings were not subject to the Brown Act, the open-meetings law. Did you suggest that they not be open to the public?

    Yes, that is what I recommend. As the superintendent’s advisory committee, it is important to protect committee members. If you’re a parent and you realize “I have to vote to close my school,” it’s not fair to put them in a position where they’re taking the heat.

    Did their names appear in the vote on recommendations?

    The results, but not the names of how people voted. 

    Do you ask the committee not to discuss what is going on? With 30 people, I’m sure it was difficult to keep things in the room.

    I’m not naïve.  You tell people, please keep it in confidence, but we’re dealing with human nature, and sometimes things get out.

    However, after every meeting, a summary of everything that went on in the meeting is made public. The first part in the process is informational. They hear information on the budget, facilities, programs, enrollment, financial projections.

    What are the criteria for deciding which schools to close? Is it diversity, test scores?

    Test scores are not a factor, but it’s school enrollment, demographics; there are legal constraints you have to take into account, like the impact on a lower socioeconomic community. You take into account even political things, like how close they are to charter schools, whether they’re dual-immersion schools and special programs. You also look at the cost of improving facilities.

    Do you recommend speaking with parents?

    There’s constant communication. You need to go to the schools that are recommended for closing. As you might expect, there’s not a lot of, “Thank you for the great work.”

    What is the process before the board?

    You present in a hearing so the public can respond. Then you present again as action.

    How to handle the transition

    Then what after the decision?

    The bad news is that’s actually the easy part. Morale can be very down. And then you go through this period where people are losing their jobs.

    There needs to be a closure period. Schools are a large part of people’s lives, so you celebrate that ending. That is very hard for boards and superintendents, but they have to be there. For a district that closes many schools, it’s like a new district, and you’re now asking, “How are we going to reimagine ourselves going  forward?”

    So how do you bring two groups of parents and teachers together?

    It starts now, not in the summer, with a meeting with staff, explaining the process, meeting with PTA groups, school site councils, since they’re going to merge parent leaders. Principals have to take the lead in making this happen.

    The transition is easier for students and harder for adults. Once kids get there, and teachers welcome them, they adapt pretty quickly.

    Is there an effect on the receiving school, too?

    Depending on how many students they’re receiving, psychologically, they close, too. The teachers may still be there, but it’s a new school.

    For teachers, the transition can go smoothly if the cultures are similar. Sometimes, you need to bring in facilitators for staff to communicate.

    Do you have meetings where kids and parents meet one another before the end of school?

    I recommend that — whenever possible, not just once. Parents especially.

    In instances where things fall apart — boards rescind decisions or can’t reach agreements on closing schools — why does this happen?

    Usually, it falls apart if you rush the process. Anyone can close a school. You just make an announcement, and that’s done. Now, you have to deal with the repercussions.

    You hear about districts where parents said they didn’t believe the dire financial problems the district says existed.

    You have to have credibility with the financing, make budget numbers available to anyone who wants to see them, and explain it over and over. You have to make your case.  

    What happened in Alum Rock?

    You strive for consensus. I’ve been involved with closures in six districts. I’ve always had unanimous votes from the boards. In Alum Rock, with that many schools, we arrived at a consensus on six (four elementary and two middle schools), but the final three were very difficult, and we were under a timeline. The superintendent had to make the decision for the final three. The board responded and modified some. In the end, they got it done.

    How has the process affected you?

    Even as a facilitator, it’s emotional. People are grieving, they love their school. The superintendent and the board go through a lot of stress. Closing a school is the hardest initiative that you’re going to face as a superintendent. 

    I’ve been willing to help, although I kept saying I was never going to do it again. This time, I really mean it.

    How Alum Rock achieved its savings

    Alum Rock Superintendent German Cerda recalls sobering words from a fiscal adviser for the state last September on the plan to close or consolidate nine schools. “He said, ‘You aren’t going to be able to. This is impossible,’” Cerda recalled, with a laugh. “He told me in my face the day they’re approving my contract. And I’m like, ‘Thank you. I’m going out there to accept the contract.’” Cerda was previously assistant superintendent in nearby Campbell Union High School District.

    Cerda proved him wrong. The closure of five schools this fall, plus the expected closure of a school with 200 students in 2026-27, along with the consolidation of four schools into two, will save $8.4 million. The savings will come from reduced expenses like electricity and fewer staff positions (a single principal, secretary, custodian, counselor and community liaison instead of two of each), he said. Additionally, the district will save $7 million to $8 million through teacher layoffs and retirements, and fewer schools with undersized classes will lead to some larger class sizes within limits set by the teachers’ contract – 31 students per class in the case of middle schools, he said.

    The savings don’t include the potential income from selling or leasing closed schools; several companies and private high schools have expressed interest, Cerda said.

    District morale is low because of layoffs and school closures, Cerda acknowledged, but in meeting with principals who will remain, he sensed excitement for the future. There will be more enrichment courses, and once again, Alum Rock will offer algebra in eighth grade – essential for any middle school in San Jose.

    “They can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.





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