At the Aug. 4 meeting of the Windsor Unified School District Board of Trustees, the 45-day revise of the budget presented a far less dire picture than previous budget discussions, thanks in large part to a significant influx of cash from the federal government as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Following the release of the governor’s initial budget earlier this year, it appeared schools would be facing a 10% loss in their state funding, a figure that would have created an approximate $4 million loss for Windsor. At the time massive cuts, including staff, sports, transportation and others were discussed out of necessity, prompting panic among the community.
However, the governor reversed those cuts, and then the federal government stepped in with learning loss mitigation funding via CARES, and what was disaster, turned into something manageable.
“Things have changed,” said chief business officer Lois Standring. “We do every year during 45-day revise, but it’s unusual to have this much of an impact on the budget. (The change) is made up of two things, first was the funding we got from the state. We had been looking at a 10% reduction in revenue and that was taken out from state’s adopted budget and we were told would get same LCFF funding we got last year … the other big change is the CARES funding coming in, which is money to help us get through learning loss from COVID and for the district it totals about $3.2 million … we won’t spend it all this year, but probably the lion’s share this year. Some of the funds have deadlines beyond this year but at least half has to be spent by December.”
Standring did have one caveat on the reversal of the cuts though, which was that their funding is based on ADA, and the district has declining enrollment, which means that even with the percentage restored, they are still receiving slightly less funds than last year.
In all, the increased revenue for the two items will be just over $5.6 million. While this has significantly improved the district’s bottom line, there are still some looming concerns.
The first is that while the governor rescinded his cut, the state is going to balance the budget by deferring its payment to schools for an as-yet-undetermined period of time (best guess according to Standring is November).
The second is that while the CARES money is extremely helpful, especially in the face of the unknown expenses of operating schools in a pandemic, it is one-time money making it not applicable to long-term planning.
This is related to the third, and largest problem, which is the ongoing structural deficit in the district’s budget. In other words, the district habitually spends more than it takes in, a problem they have been trying to tackle for some time.
Still the change in the funding picture has been a bright spot, with the district moving from having to file as qualified for a three-year period, to now having a positive ending fund balance after three years of just over $2.4 million, enough to fulfill the reserve requirements.
“The bottom line is that what this shows us is that total revenue goes up by $5.7 million, which is a really good thing for this year, and if we go to the multi-year — remember when we adopted the budget the multi-year did not look good — we only met the reserve requirement first year, and now we’re able to squeak by even in the third year. It doesn’t change our structural deficit, but it does at least get us breathing space to work on what were going to do to fix the deficit,” said Standring.
Standring also put together projections regarding the district’s cash flow with the pending deferrals in mind. Districts who can’t weather the deferrals will be forced to borrow the money to cover costs until the payments come in, though in some cases they can borrow them from their own bond funds.
“One other thing was cash flow, because I know it’s of great interest with deferrals going on,” she said. “We are squeaking by … by the time the year ends we’re predicted to have a $1 million in cash which doesn’t make me breathe easy, but at least we don’t have to borrow. I will monitor this monthly but at this point, we don’t have to run out and figure out if we have to borrow from our bond fund.”
Other items related to the budget discussed included potentially stopping a transfer of $500,000 from a $1 million donation from the Lytton tribe some years ago into the district’s general fund. Trustees have left that money untouched in hopes of using it for a big project or as a measure of last resort, which it appeared they were facing earlier this year. The plan is that at the first interim budget review if numbers still look positive, they will not transfer the funds.
Similarly, the budget approved at this meeting still contains a $750,000 set-aside for COVID-related expenses which will now likely be covered by the CARES funds. That too will likely be removed at first interim.
Other items of note:
- Student board member Ava Hamelburg gave a presentation on a survey she ran of fellow students from Windsor High School and some from the middle school, that showed their biggest questions going into the fall into four categories: daily schedule, computer time (how much of a school day will be online), attendance (how it will be determined and calculated and zoom, and the difference between classwork and homework.
- Windsor District Educators Association president Pete Stefanisko said WDEA is exploring the creation of a social justice committee and they would like to work with the district in looking at things like curriculum, hiring practices, how they can better serve students of color, how they can add more female authors into literature studies and a variety of other issues.
