First published in the June 17 print issue of the South Pasadena Review.
The 2022-23 adopted budget presented to the South Pasadena Board of Education featured plentiful state funding, but administrators are urging caution ahead of the final budget preparation.
“At the beginning of most Junes, we don’t have all the information we need,” Dave Lubs, assistant superintendent of business services, said at the June 14 meeting. “There are often plenty of unknowns, but this year there are more unknowns than any year I’ve experienced.”
Unanticipated money from the state was taken into consideration for the budget, which is available for viewing on the SPUSD website.
LCFF funding, a formula that determines how local educational agencies are funded, increased from $3.3 billion in January to $6.1 billion in May after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May budget revisions. Statutory COLA (cost of living adjustments) also increased to 6.56% from 5.33% with the revision.
Multiple factors could affect these figures in the coming weeks, especially as the national and state economies are in flux. The stock market can affect California’s budget, as well as the costs of goods and services or the shortage of goods.
Newsom will meet with the State Assembly and Senate to collectively work on the state budget and smooth out any differences. The outcome will likely affect the SPUSD budget.
For example, the legislative version of the budget features $1.2 billion in transportation funding that will offer transportation for TK-6 and low-income students starting in the 2027-28 school year. Newsom’s budget has no transportation funding.
Another influence is the average daily attendance, the rate at which children attend school. It’s on the decline as a result of pandemic quarantine and illness as well as independent study options. SPUSD’s adopted budget includes the governor’s declining enrollment protection, a solution for ADA decline.
The SPUSD adopted budget has 8.11% in reserves, which is more than the required 3% minimum. Three percent is equivalent to roughly three weeks of payroll at SPUSD and keeping the reserves above that minimum accounts for employee health benefit increases, an increase in contributions to the special education program and a decrease in enrollment.
No vote on the budget was taken at the meeting, but the deadline to approve the budget and send it to the county is June 30.
“It looks like we are being offered a considerable amount of money going into this,” Board Member Ruby Kalra said. “And we are not only seeing the rising cost but we’re all talking about potential recession. In past years, they’ve come in and changed the budget midyear and told us we’re not getting as much as we anticipated. It’s really hard to be in this position now.”
SPUSD Acknowledges Power Outage Problem
The SPUSD school board is working toward solutions to frequent Edison power outages across the district that could cause technology, maintenance and financial problems.
Superintendent Geoff Yantz brought the issue to the board’s attention at the June 14 meeting after an outage in May forced the relocation of AP testing to Holy Family Church, located across the street from the high school.
Although the district has backup systems in place, technology could potentially be “blown out” when the power comes back on, according to Yantz. He also mentioned that SPUSD experiences one to two power outages every month that range from seconds to hours and that surrounding districts aren’t having the same problem.
The district is currently reaching out to others in the city to see how widespread the problem is and has been in touch with Edison, which says the power infrastructure is old.
“Sometimes those anecdotal conversations of ‘boy, the power sure seem to go out here a lot,’ I think it’s evidenced when you speak to these other districts and they’re saying, ‘yeah, we’re not really dealing with those issues,’ it does seem like something pretty local to us and something we need to push them on,” Board President Zahir Robb said.
