Workshop Meeting

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[10] Ray Rodriguez: start with roll call. Ms. Aquino. Thank you. If you don't mind. Thank you.

[16] SPEAKER_21: President Rodriguez. Here. Vice President Thomas. Here. Member Martinez.

[21] Penny DeLeon: Here.

[22] SPEAKER_21: Member Gutierrez. Here. Member John.

[27] Ray Rodriguez: All right, you did the pronunciation was good. Yeah, her pronunciation is correct. Yeah, you did very good. OK, we have public comment. I always like having public comment before anything that we do, just in case anybody wants to address us on what we're going to be doing. In this case, we have public comment before we do our board workshop, which is going to be the budget update. So by Mr. Nguyen, right? Yes. Good. Do we have anybody that would like to address the board prior to us starting the workshop? OK. Seeing none. Superintendent?

[71] SPEAKER_22: Thank you. Thank you, President Rodriguez, members of the board, ladies and gentlemen. At this time, I'm going to turn it over to Kai Nguyen, who's going to walk us through a budget update and also introduce our external consultants relative to budget. I'm going to go down there. Yeah, and we'd like to invite you all down to the table, and we're going to do the study session down here. And we did provide snacks out of my donation account, not general fund, this evening.

[97] Ray Rodriguez: You want us to bring this with us? That's for later? Thank you.

[107] Elisa Martinez: So we don't need anything? Nope.

[147] SPEAKER_28: We'll wait for Mr. Rodriguez to come back, and then we'll be done.

[154] SPEAKER_28: I can make some noise. Anyone has a three-day weekend coming up?

[164] SPEAKER_35: I hope so. Yeah, I did.

[204] Ray Rodriguez: Just that I already know, the snacks and the water were provided by the superintendent? By donation of talent. By what? By donation of talent. Your donation?

[213] Michael Milliken: Donation of talent. Thank you.

[216] Nancy Thomas: It's still part of the general fund, did you know that? Technically, yeah.

[225] SPEAKER_28: So, with that said, we're going to, so good evening board members, Stephen Sanchez. Tonight I want to talk about the budget study session. Can I switch? Sure. Sorry. So we've been in discussion, after we had a qualified certification on our first interim, we've been in discussion with Alameda County Office of Education. They recommended that we should seek out a consulting company to work on our structural deficit, our structural budget. And they recommend that we reach out to Brolin Consulting Group. And we have here is Beverly. She's been as a CBO for the last 20 years. as well as 28 years in the K-12 education business. And she's been working with other school districts. She has a wealth of knowledge in K-12 and the fiscal services side as well. So she'll be talking about, I'm sorry, would you like to make any comments about yourself as of right now?

[297] SPEAKER_25: I'd just like to say that it's good that the board is facing these things because it's, a problem throughout the state right now where the funding is at, and especially districts are in a decline. And we're not alone. A lot of districts across the state have the same thing declining. I was surprised to hear that across the state now we're actually declining the state as funding, and that causes problems in every district. So you're just not alone. I just want to let you know that.

[329] SPEAKER_28: I'm going to talk about that a little bit later in regards to the declining enrollment statewide.

[334] Ray Rodriguez: Yes, Ray. I'm sorry. I just want to make sure that we have her info in case anyone just wants to reach out to her, you know, for whatever reason. Yeah, I sent my resume. Thank you.

[347] SPEAKER_28: So, with that said, oh, thank you. With that said, as you know, we met from, Budget Advisory Committee we met for the last, from October through December, and these are our committee, met at least 10 times. The Budget Advisory Committee realized that the district is in a structural deficit, we all agreed on that, and that our enrollment has been declining for several years, but reduction has not been made since, in a long time. We injected $3.3 million in 17-18 into the general fund just to cover our ongoing expenditures. All right. So basically, we've been kicking the can down the road. But now, we're facing a structural crisis that we need to address.

[409] SPEAKER_28: I'm going to hand out this little executive summary from FCMAP. And I presented this during the first in-row. as well, but did not provide an answer to the summary to you. So, as you see here, I highlighted what the, oh, thank you, Sean. I highlighted what FCMAT stated, that the district will need to incrementally reduce the budget by $4 to $5 million over the next two years. This is in June 2017. We're already at now the new school year, New fiscal year, school year is, we're in January 2019. So why is Newark Unified School District is on the water? Despite increasing in funding. Mainly because of our declining enrollment. And ongoing budget reduction or revenue enhancement has never been addressed. And unfortunately our PERS, CalPERS, CalSTRS contribution has been continuing to rise. Also special education contribution, we have to support our special ed students. So that's a burden on our general fund. So as I mentioned during the first interim report that our enrollment has been declining. For the last several years, if you looked at in 2000 and 2001, our room was at 7,666 students. And now, 18 years later, we're at 5,779. But in 2011 and 12, we're at 6,560 students. We're at 5,779 students. That's a loss of about 780 students. we're losing about $7.8 million or $7.4 million roughly in terms of LCFL funding. So when we talked about during first interim, during the adopted budget that was passed in June, approved by the board, that we expected enrollment to increase from 17-18 in 18-19 of this year, but instead, our enrollment right now is at roughly 5,779 students. We were hoping that enrollment will come in at 5,914, but in reality, that did not occur. Unfortunately, we project that enrollment will continue to increase in the outer years, but unfortunately, that did not come to fruition. enrollment we're projecting that now. The budget advisory committee all agreed that we should project our enrollment to be flat line throughout the outer years. So that way we don't have to be looking at reduction as much. However, when I first came on board, when I did the core survival method, I was projecting that our enrollment will continue to decline. I realize that there's a lot of new housing development in the area and that we don't know when those students will come in, will enroll in our school district. So the ultimate goal is that we should project conservatively and not optimistically.

[629] SPEAKER_22: So, just pausing there for a moment. That's kind of the first premise that we're probably going to have the board wrestle with a little bit is which of those theories do we want to apply? Does the board want to stick with the flat recommendation or do they want to do a decline or some other version? Because that will create staffing based on whatever number that is will drive the staffing after that. So we'll probably get more into that in a minute. I want you to start thinking about that because that That has implications.

[660] Nancy Thomas: I think when we were on the committee and we thought about black, it was kind of taking Kai's decline and David's demographics incline and saying, well, let's don't go to each extreme. Let's just keep it black. But I've been told we've already declined more in enrollment during the year. And with the housing and whatever analysis we're making about why our students are leaving and where they're going. We may want to rethink the plan.

[693] SPEAKER_28: So I want to introduce Larry Simon. He's our director of technology. He's going to give us some information about the demographics, where did the student move to, and where are the students are coming from. So go ahead, Larry.

[707] Elisa Martinez: And sorry, I had a question just about the demographic projection. Is it only through three years, not two years out? We have no other data that's trying to, you know, that's pointing us one way or another.

[720] SPEAKER_28: Okay. So Davis Demographics is going to present next month. They were going to try to present this month, but due to the scheduling of whether we're going to attend board meetings either on Tuesday or Thursday, they couldn't make it for this month. So they're going to be there next month. And we also, Beverly brought it up. Thank you, Beverly, that Davis Demographics only gave us one option that they're projecting that enrollment is going to increase. I'm hoping they're right. I'm really hoping that they're right, that enrollment will increase. But this is just one option here.

[754] Elisa Martinez: I want to see. It's also a minor increase at the end of the day. Let's just say it's an incline, but it's almost negligible, right? So I think that's what you need to be right.

[765] SPEAKER_28: So we need to ask them, what is the extreme measure? What if enrollment do decline? How much further down are we going to go? Or what if, optimistically, that all of a sudden a flood of new students coming in, how much more can we get in terms of enrollment?

[782] SPEAKER_25: I just want to add something. Your demographer can give you scenarios of where you're going to be, and they should be given to you for at least 10 years. I just came from a district, Dublin, where we grew 1,000 kids a year. I couldn't build schools fast enough. But there are things in our district that I think your district needs to implement here that could help you with attracting people to the district. And I'll be talking about that a little later.

[812] SPEAKER_28: So with that said, Larry, I'm going to provide some information in regards to where our student went.

[819] SPEAKER_26: I was asked to do a little analysis on the entrance and exit. To start, this is the same information Kai had shown you. This is our enrollment trend since 2003 is when I started it. You can see the steady decline. The first bits of information I'm going to show you probably aren't going to be new to most of you. These are the exits since 2014 through now. You see we had a little bit of a peak in 16-17, but around the same number every year. I excluded the graduations. This is just non-graduates. You can see the percents and the numbers there. Less public school in CA this year than last year, but all in all even, and this might be a little more useful way to look at it. This is the same information graphed out visually. So obviously most of our kids are going to another public school in California, but some are going outside of California and some even outside of the country. Same kind of information for entry trends. I think this one's a little more interesting. This is a lot of numbers, so I'm going to show you the same information on the graph. If you can see here, we sort of stayed flat for first-time entrants to school, but where we saw a decline this year were from entrants from different districts and different counties in the same state. The number's a lot smaller, so that's a significant decrease from last year than we normally have. And this is going to be a new bit of information. I remember a couple of board meetings ago, I think it was you, Nancy, who requested to see, well, can we know where the students are going? Can we look at that information? So we tried to compile some of that. And this would be a geographical representation of where the kids are going. You can see for the exits, we have a lot of kids that are ending up sort of in the valley and sort of in the Los Angeles area, and not as many coming in from those areas. And you can see the straight numbers there. You can draw your own conclusions on the information, but that's what I was able to analyze from our enters and exits. This is only for the last school year, and this is only for kids that went to public schools in CA or came from public schools in California. Obviously, I couldn't find this information for kids who went out of state or out of country or whatnot. Any questions about this piece of information? Entering from Missouri where you would say that they're coming from yeah, I mean most of them are coming within 10 miles So it's okay from Fremont Hayward Union City, right? But then you start to see a few coming out from a little further probably mostly within the Bay Area Little pockets coming in from other areas like from you know, NorCal the valley, but mostly from inside the area.

[990] SPEAKER_22: It looks like Closer to Oakland Hayward

[995] SPEAKER_26: No, it's mostly these. This is us. There's a little more up here too, probably like Hayward, maybe not as far as Oakland. You can see from our exits though, we do have a lot outgoing too. The darker the color gets on the map, the more concentration students notice.

[1015] Bowen Zhang: Do you know the profession of all the parents that come to you this year?

[1021] SPEAKER_26: I wouldn't say our data is very accurate on that for our students themselves. I mean, we have, we know professions generally in the area, but not, you know, just because there are other census data and things like that available.

[1033] Nancy Thomas: Don't we know whether they have graduated high school or have a degree?

[1037] SPEAKER_26: Yeah, we do have that information, yeah.

[1039] Nancy Thomas: So maybe you could parse it out by whether or not they have a degree.

[1042] SPEAKER_26: Well, I do have another piece of information on this, too, which also addresses by average home that they work. So maybe this will be, I mean, we can look at that information as well. So this is the same sort of graph overlaid over an average home value based on zip code and the Zillow home value index. So I also compiled it based on are they going to or coming from more expensive areas or less expensive areas. And we do have a significant number of exits to significantly lower cost of living. Which is... That makes sense. That does make a lot of sense. I was a little surprised that we do, it's not all that. You know, this isn't, it's significantly different, but there's still a decent number of students going out to higher cost of living and coming in from higher cost of living. So there's sort of an ebb and flow there, I guess. I only had data for the last year. Although those whole values, I would love to see that again. Yeah, so I compiled a lot into here, but there are some that are significantly, significantly different. Right, right. Yeah. Okay. So how did you determine their home values? So every student, I found their destination school, city, and I pulled the Zillow home value for the zip code. So that's how I determined the data for 18-19. I couldn't do it for past years. We didn't really have that kind of information collected, but we could see trends in that data if we did something like that, probably.

[1127] Bowen Zhang: Do you see any connection about income and student related to the new construction, either at Bayshore or?

[1133] SPEAKER_26: the CW construction. I tried to look into that. I didn't have enough information on how much is completed. I mean, anecdotally, because I live in the area, I know the housing on Cedar is completed, but the Willow development's not completed, and the one back there by the bridge is not completed. So I don't think a ton of the new houses are done. The one on Cherry is not done. So I don't think we've seen the full impact of that yet. Most of our enters, if we go back to here, are, oh, I went too far. They're still the first time to enter school. That's mostly kindergarten students. There's a lot of TKs in there. I have a slide on TK as well. So I do expect if we're going to see growth, it's probably going to be in that area. But I completely, I'm not an expert.

[1178] Elisa Martinez: Yeah. Anecdotally.

[1180] Nancy Thomas: Yeah. This is really interesting data.

[1183] SPEAKER_22: It helps to have good questions for when the demographic is here.

[1187] SPEAKER_26: Yeah, right. So my last slide. ADA, there was a big question on why do we have kids that are, why is our enrollment higher than our ADA eligible enrollment? Well, we take TKs that, the state's rule is they have to be five by December 2nd or you don't get ADA for them. So we only get ADA for them once they turn five, if they're five after December 2nd. So you'll see, this is our total enrollment, number of kids we're serving. This is the number of kids we're able to collect ADA on. And they start to converge after December 2nd. So we'll eventually be collecting ADA on all of them, right?

[1220] Bowen Zhang: That five number, that's for transitional kindergarten, right? If you're in kindergarten, I think you're already aware of that.

[1226] SPEAKER_26: I'm sorry, I used the wrong word. Transitional kindergarten, yeah, not kindergarten, yeah. Transitional kindergarten.

[1230] Elisa Martinez: But the cutoff is five.

[1232] SPEAKER_26: The cutoff is five, yeah. That's short of any legislative changes, the cutoff is five. Well, we have 40 non-ADA. Not anymore, but we did, yes. So those are students you're serving.

[1243] Nancy Thomas: But by January 15th, we have fewer, but that means We are serving that many kids without getting any money for them. And we did that deliberately to hopefully keep them.

[1257] SPEAKER_26: I believe that was the board's decision a number of years ago to keep them early so that the idea was they would stay with you in the outer years. Because if you keep a kid for 12 years, that's 12 years of ADA, right?

[1269] Nancy Thomas: How many teachers does that represent, which is kind of a gauge on how much it's costing us?

[1274] SPEAKER_26: I don't have that level of detail in this information, but 40 kids, probably two classrooms.

[1280] Nancy Thomas: So we have, yeah, so it's like 220k.

[1283] SPEAKER_26: Well, but it's only for an increment, it's for four months, so it's... And it's a little, it'll, that number gets shrinked, so by P2, this number will be, P2 is like March, I think?

[1294] SPEAKER_28: It's in April.

[1296] SPEAKER_26: April, yeah, so by P2, this number should be even lower, right? Hopefully to zero or close. Otherwise, it's a really young TK student.

[1304] Nancy Thomas: Well, we don't take TK students that turn five before the end of January, right? Isn't that our window? I don't know the dates. Our window is the end of January, so.

[1314] Elisa Martinez: So do we have a ton more material? Because it's interesting. I think this is something we need to go over. We know that there's a gap. But if there is deliberate, I'd like to know. Thank you, that was really helpful.

[1337] SPEAKER_35: I'm going to go to the next slide here.

[1353] SPEAKER_28: So again, as I mentioned to you, back in 2011-12 we had, let me pull up the data here, we had enrollment 6,560 enrollment students, we had about 308 FTE certificate staff. And I'm gonna explain a little bit later how and why the gains were made while we added more FTEs in 15-16, as well as in 14-15, and then all of a sudden it declined here. so I'll talk about that later, but as you can see, we haven't made that much of a change in terms of FTEs, even though our enrollment has declined by 781 students from 2011-12 to present day, 2018-19. This number, we changed from 303 or 302 to 299 because we couldn't locate FTEs, speech pathologist and speech therapist, so it was a decline of 3.6 FTEs.

[1420] Nancy Thomas: But we are paying for them because we're bringing in.

[1422] SPEAKER_28: We're outsourcing the services. Yeah, so the cost is, yeah. That's correct. So this, we'll definitely be looking at hiring because it's special education, we have to provide services to our special ed students. So we'll have to be looking at addressing hiring a special speech pathologist, speech therapist. They're in high demand for speech therapists and speech pathologists. So I'm going to help Bradley talk more about our declining enrollment, how funding and ADA works. You can go forward and backward.

[1464] SPEAKER_25: There are very peculiar issues with a declining district, and it's very much a problem across the state, especially now with so many districts in a decline. And our revenue stream is going down from the state, unfortunately, because this is the final year that we'll have those big increases. We'll start going to just COLA. And COLA doesn't apply to everywhere in the LCFF, the formula that we determine our funding for. What I wanted to talk about is declining enrollment means one thing, that you get, if you decline anything, you get to use the prior year. So the state gives you a little window in there to use the revenue from the prior year, which is really good, your enrollment from the prior year. So that helps your funding. But that doesn't relieve the need for cuts. You need to, they're just going to be delayed. One of the things that this district from everything I've read, budget cuts have not been made, and what has been done is ongoing expenditures continue at the same level, but you're putting one-time sources in to fund it. That's a problem. That means one-time sources and ongoing expenditures. That's your staffing. And once you staff at the beginning of the year, if you decline, you've got a problem. So that is a problem. When you're at a decline like this, If you don't make the cuts immediately, especially when you've been putting in one-time money to fund it, you are probably going to have reduced a lot more. And this district, because they lose a lot of one-time money, it's a problem. 3.3?

[1570] SPEAKER_28: 3.3 last year. Yes. From special reserve.

[1575] SPEAKER_25: But you got the staffing the same, and that is a problem. So you need to actually look at that because that's going to be long-term. You still may be hiring some. But in general, you need to reduce your, you need to look at your class size and that could be your objective thing for looking at. Probably, you could be overstaffed. I mean, if you don't do something about it. Also what happens in a declining district, you start cutting everything that's easy to cut. You go to books and supplies. You go to anything you can cut. You cut travel. You cut the instructional programs. That's a problem. You don't, they don't get as many books. A big problem is you don't get to give raises to, if you don't cut, you don't get to give raises to your personnel. That is a big problem. Because then morale goes down across the district. You can't give decent raises. And guess what happens? The instructional program tends to decline at that point. And you never want to. The main focus of the school district is educate those kids. So really, you don't want to be cutting from those programs. But you need to look at staffing, because that's ongoing expenditures all the time. And if you avoid cutting when you need to, in another year, you may have to cut two or three times as much. I mean, taking the one-time money to stop the bleeding, it doesn't help. The state hasn't helped you either. The state gave us a lot of one-time money, the increase in the formula. They also gave us one-time money, so we know it was there. It would either come in at the beginning or it would come in near the middle of the year. So the state didn't help you. When you give you one-time money, you think it's in your revenue, but it's not. Like this year, there is no one-time money. And it's been there. The one-time money was there for over six years. So you got used to that money being there. But the amount of one-time money went up and down, you know, from $200, some of them were at $300, you know, some of them went down to $69. So the one-time money the governor just bandied about. I mean, by the end of the year, when he determined what money he had, then he would do something. One of the problems, the compensation increases will be lost unless their budget reduction is equal to the revenue loss. That really needs to happen. It needs not to be one-time money. And sometimes your budget's going to have one-time money, but this year you don't have that. No more students. When the educational program starts declining, people won't come to the district as much because the main focus of our district is education. You want to increase the educational program so the kids learn. Those are things that, in our district, Dublin got known for an excellent educational program. People were moving into the district because they wanted to be in the educational program. So that's something the district needs to consider.

[1753] Ray Rodriguez: I just wanted to ask you, in my experience, you know, prior to, you know, the school board before, coming from a union background, it seemed like sometimes unions are Would rather let's say cut let's say 10% have you cut 10% so that the 90% the core You have enough money to give them a raise and then without having to cut programs or anything is that basically?

[1782] SPEAKER_25: Something that you're seeing or yeah definitely you want to leave enough money for the educational programs make the specialized things you want and that you can actually run them. You know, if you don't cut the staffing, you're not going to have the funding. You're going to have staffing taking up a greater percentage of your budget, and especially with the STRS and HRS that are increasing every year. And we heard some things from the new budget that are going to help, but once again, they're one time. So it's not necessarily going to help. The impact of ADA decline is across the board. One time money being used to stop cuts, because we all know that's a hard thing to do. Nobody wants to do that. But there are things that just need to be done or you're going to be down the line having bigger problems. Okay? Any questions?

[1831] Ray Rodriguez: Okay. It seems like when they talk about early childhood education, it's a big thing, especially when you're running for office. But yet, from the time that Schwarzenegger proposed it and didn't fund it, that's always been, you know, a thing, a carrot, basically. Yes. Where, you know, you want to do it, but you've got to make sure you have the money to do it.

[1856] SPEAKER_25: Yeah. And one of the good things is Gavin Newsom, our new governor, that's one of his focuses. He's actually trying to fund it as much as he can. And he's bringing money in one time, But it's just a proposal at this point to help with some of it, some of the purrs and stirs and help with the... Yeah, that's a big one, purrs and stirs. Yeah, yeah. He's going to put some one-time money in it and that will help you, but it's one time.

[1883] SPEAKER_28: I'm going to talk a little bit more about what the governor proposed budget in the next presentation. But this slide here, this is straight out from school services. of California. This is what the governor is proposing for CalSTRS. He is infusing, proposed, infusing $3 billion of non-profit position 98 funds into CalSTRS. So that way, our employer contribution, which is school districts, currently, for 19-20, our contribution was gonna be at 18.13%. It's gonna go down to 17%, so it's a 1% roughly decline, as well as in 2021, 1%. But then in the outer years, 21, 22, 22, 23, it's only 0.5, a half a percent. But these are all proposed. I'm gonna go a little bit more in detail later on with the governor's proposal presentation. CalPERS, though, will still continue to rise contribution. We still have to, school districts will still have to contribute. So police, even police officers, Cities, counties, they still have to contribute into the CalPERS retirement system for their employees. So again, as I mentioned during the first interim report, that in 2013, our school district contributed about $3.5 million into CalPERS and CalSTRS. But if you look five years later, in 2018-19, now we're contributing about $6.8 million into CalSTRS, roughly almost half from 2013-14. So that's a major burden on our school district, on the general fund, excuse me. As I mentioned as well, Jennifer's in the room, for every dollar we bring in in terms of revenue, 49 cents, goes to certificate salaries. 21 cents goes to benefits, whether it's medical benefits, personal service contribution, workman's compensation, et cetera. And then 13 cents goes to classified salaries. This service and operations, most of it is for special education. And part of it goes to maintaining our school facilities, And again, we only spend about four cents on books and supplies.

[2050] SPEAKER_31: One question, just going back to the previous slide.

[2052] SPEAKER_28: Yeah.

[2052] SPEAKER_31: You don't have to switch, but were we, did we project accurately the increase in the CalPERS and CalSERS, or did it increase higher than projected?

[2064] SPEAKER_28: In terms of?

[2065] SPEAKER_31: The percentages. So it, The percentage keeps on going up above what has to be contributed. But was that already taken into account? Did we project the same numbers? Or did it increase? Was the percentage higher than what we had projected?

[2082] SPEAKER_28: I projected the higher number. The higher percentage. Not the lower projected numbers. But the proposed rates from the government. I did not do that one. Okay. So here's the multi-year projection. And we have a, sorry.

[2098] Elisa Martinez: Sorry, I had a quick question around the reason that special ed is in service and operations. Will it always be that way or is it just because we're having to contract that service? And would it normally show up in salaries?

[2111] SPEAKER_28: Right. So we have paraeducators. They're funded out of restricted funds for special education. We also receive speech pathologists. We have some speech pathologists, speech therapists here, but we need to hire more.

[2128] Elisa Martinez: But once they become our employees, again, you know, one of the topics on the agenda is paying out the contracts because we can't hire. Is that the bucket we would always carry it under?

[2138] SPEAKER_22: Not necessarily. Generally, we end up having to farm stuff out either because we can't attract or hire or retain staff. And sometimes we have to contract out because there's unique services that we don't have enough of a critical mass. for that, like, for example, a student who's maybe got a severe medical situation on top of special education needs that might have a series of problems. And some of those you can't predict. But special ed is an area that continues to consume a larger chunk or budget. And sometimes, you know, I think programmatically we probably need to have a conversation about can we do some of the extreme services and do it in-house and potentially talk about having a center-based program that would be a place that we can actually provide services to other districts nearby. But it ebbs and flows. But I think special ed, once it's in the IEP, we're required to maintain it. And I think that becomes a real challenge.

[2207] Elisa Martinez: And I think the reason I was asking, maybe, you know, if you could shed some light on maybe how there's other districts do it, I mean, if, you know, the, our specialized need disproportionately, I think, you know, I had heard some numbers before, I don't, I can't, I won't quote them, but if our mix of what we'll call cost of salaries, because we need, you know, more expensive resources, if we're not really counting them into the bucket we need, then we're not really, you know. we're not allocating the funds to go and actually have the salaries, be able to support the salaries that we need to in order to attract and stop outsourcing on every three month increments, right? So the question, sorry for my long-winded question.

[2258] SPEAKER_25: Yeah, one of the things that I districts can consider is exactly what the superintendent was talking about. Literally, you do some allocating through your SELPA, which is your special education local plan, and you work together. I think yours is SPREMA as a part of your SELPA? Yeah. Yeah. There are things where you can bring in, maybe they, you work with a plan with them, and maybe one district runs this type of program, so they get more critical mass. This district could be, you know, find a specialty here and the district, you can get some of the growth from Fremont and special education, especially a district like that that's probably had the kids come in all the time. Each district can't provide all the resources and the expensive resources that need to be there, you know, and all the I think the resource specialist or something is going to be in every district, but the thing that's not in there, a lot of the autistic services, which are going up every year throughout the state, that we need to look at, do we have the right teachers, the right paraprofessionals, do we have those right people. You can meet, what we did in Dublin was because we had the most growth in the whole cell phone. So we took a lot of areas that other districts didn't want to have, but you decide for yourself who runs what program. And then when you're sending kids out, you just take the revenues back and forth and you get to bill for the people that come from other districts. And that really works. And when you have a really good self-help, they should help you with that. See where the kid's growth is, what kind of needs we have. We know autism's always going up. But what are the other things? When they're severe, the emotionally disturbed child. It's going to be in every district. Everyone needs that. But between the self, there's some other areas that may not need to be in every district. I mean, you would never take out the resource specialist. You would never take out a speech therapist. That's in demand everywhere. You grab a speech therapist when you can get them. And you need to always have those in the district. But consider what you need and what you have. And you could decrease costs that way.

[2402] Nancy Thomas: I have a question. Of that 12% or 12 cents on the dollar that services and operations, do you know off the top of your head how much of that is for special ed contracts and people that we have contracted that otherwise would be in our certificated salaries and classified salaries because we're bringing them?

[2426] SPEAKER_28: I had that little chart last time, but I took it off. But I can definitely bring that back later on.

[2432] Nancy Thomas: But I mean, because in that 12 cents, that's all of our maintenance costs. It's all of our PT&E. It's our leases for copiers. That 12 cents has a lot in it. But Special Ed is taking a bigger and bigger chunk.

[2449] SPEAKER_28: Right. I mean, the bottom line is that the reciprocal revenue is here. But the district had to contribute this much more. Yeah.

[2455] Elisa Martinez: But I think that's why it's so important to announce this point that we do. I think I like that better than what you had before because then we can actually start doing the funding versus the cost portion, right?

[2464] SPEAKER_25: Right now we can't do that. Yeah, the contribution that needs to come from the general fund is obviously a problem. But when it gets bigger and bigger all the time, so when you're in a district that's in a decline, you need to bring in more kids. So definitely, those are things that the district should consider.

[2483] SPEAKER_28: So here's the multi-year projection. Revenues coming in and projected, 65, let's just say $66 million. However, our expenditure is 67 million. So we're deficit spending by $1.1 million in this year anticipation. It's going to grow because we're all agreed that enrollment is going to be flat line. However, if you notice that the COLA is going to go up, but our enrollment because we projected our enrollment is going to be here, but in reality our enrollment is down here. So normally we would, our revenue would have gone up more than last year, than this year. However, again, our decline enrollment offset the cost of living adjustments. And our expenditure, because of second column, person service contribution, so we're just spending $2.5 million, or let's just say $2.4. And then the out-of-years. I want to do 2021 and 2022, but I'm kind of afraid to see what it's going to look like.

[2565] Nancy Thomas: I think one of the big things we need to realize about that 1.18 million is that it should have been zero. If we had a balanced budget coming into this year, the state then on September 15th took away about $500,000. So that's 500,000 of that 1.187. And then the difference between our prior year ADA and our declining enrollment took another chunk. which was about $800,000, right? Right. So we went from $800,000 that were kind of beyond our control to 1.187, and I'm wondering, and this will be something to look into, where did that extra cost come from beyond what we budgeted to go from 800,000 to 1.2 million? That's about $400,000. And I know you captured it in the first interim and other expenses that you had to add in because they weren't budgeted last year. And I think we need a handle on that and make sure that we know what those costs were.

[2635] SPEAKER_28: OK. So the one-time discretionary fund last year, what was budgeted? during our adopted budget that we were going to receive $344 per ADA. But then the former governor decided to decrease the one-time discretionary fund from $344 to $184. So we lost potential revenues coming in. But we budgeted here, but in reality, it came in this much more, less, it came in less. And then, but he did add more into the base fund. He took that 344, some of that 344 into the one-time discretionary fund, excuse me, into the base fund. So that's, so you see that the revenue was the same even though our amount declined, he just increased the base fund. So does that answer your question?

[2699] Nancy Thomas: Well, no, what I need to know is if you add The extra cost from declining enrollment this year and the extra cost that the state took away, it should be about $800,000. Yet, it's $1.2 million that we are spending. So we've added about $400,000 to our deficit. And you put in some costs. And you said it was special ed and other services that you added into the first interim.

[2732] SPEAKER_22: Remember, Thomas is asking for us to break that out in detail. Where does that come from? That's really what you're asking. What's the detail behind that? How does that add up to that number?

[2742] Nancy Thomas: Yeah, why did we not budget for that $400,000? We can do that. We can look into that.

[2746] Toni Stone: We can do that. OK.

[2749] SPEAKER_28: So again, we're OK at the first 18-19 this year. We're fairly OK. We've got to meet a lease. 3% reserved for economic uncertainty, which is this dollar amount, so we're okay here. But we're not gonna meet in the 2021 without a doubt, right? So the county will not allow us to have a positive certification. We have to address our structural deficit here, so. So What the governor proposed, again, as I mentioned to you earlier, he's proposing an injection of one time $3 billion to reduce the CalSTRS contribution for 19-20, 20-21, and the other two out of years. The COLA, so LCFF is fully funded, so the only source of revenue the school districts are getting is cost of living adjustments. So it's going to go from 2.57% to 3.46%. Again, these are proposed. We can't factor this thing in yet. All right.

[2821] Nancy Thomas: But while we were, our three-year projection was based on 2.57, but now we're going to get 3.46. Potential. We're getting another percent overall, we thought.

[2834] SPEAKER_28: So our one-time discretionary fund, we've been having, The last, like what Beverly was saying, five, six years of one-time discretionary funds for ADA is no longer available. Because Prop 98, even though the state of California, the general fund came in astronomically high, everyone's working, there's no money. It's a very bright picture for the state of California. But overall, the enrollment has declined throughout the state. So the one-time discretionary fund is not available for this year, based on the governor's... We're pushing on five minutes now.

[2877] SPEAKER_22: Oh, okay. Let me... I'd like to... Tell me... I'm sorry. Let's use this last five minutes to get direction from the board on how you can start creating scenarios to bring back to the board and information so they can start making informed decisions on cuts that we need to make. I think that's probably a good use of this time. We already have one example, which is I want to see the breakdown of that 1.8 or whatever that number was, because I think that's really why we brought in the outside consultant was to help really give some external recommendations to the board on what we should look at. So do you want to talk with these folks and see what they want to see at the next flooding study session? Because I think that I know it's worth the time understanding the problem, but at the end of the day, if we can't identify this 1.8, the clock's ticking. But I also know we have a little bit of time to get there, and I think that's kind of what we're hoping you guys can help guide through with the board.

[2940] Elisa Martinez: I guess, you know, your question is what do we want to see? I mean, I think that, you know, again, the numbers that you reviewed, they're not new to us. We've seen them now a few times, right? So we know that there is a gap. We know that we've been kicking the can down the road, and that at the end of the day, you know, there's a few inputs to the equation if you will, right? There is our enrollment, we're funded, and then there's the cost side. And so I think that it's, we can say we, you know, we need to write slides. Hey, look, we haven't, right? But what does that mean? Because I think it's also not as easy as saying cut all, you know, pencils and books, right? But it really is, even if you're looking at the bucket of salaries, right? How do we actually objectively look at it rather than just an equation of number? Like, you know, it's got to be 2.2 million, whatever it is, but rather, If we look at the, at our student body, right, where are the opportunities from the needs, making sure that we're not going to impact the needs, or how do we minimize the needs? So just kind of getting into the details of, give us some options, right? Because it's not good or pretty for anything, for anybody, but at the end of the day, it's got to be, you know, fact-based, need-based.

[3018] SPEAKER_25: Yes. Because right now, it's really important that the district is properly staffed, and that's where we need to spend the time.

[3025] Bowen Zhang: Yes, so I believe, compared to New Haven Unified District, we probably have the lowest ratio of the student to staff, around 24. Which is incredible. And our neighboring, the Union City, New Haven, and maybe even Fremont, they got 1 to 26, 27. Yeah, it's always been there. Yeah, so we've been 1 to 24.

[3050] Nancy Thomas: we're more than the state and we're more than our neighboring districts in terms of the amount of staffing we have.

[3058] Ray Rodriguez: So we have the ability to go up to 29, but we just can't, for K-3 I'm talking about, we can't stay at that And then the other area is how we talk to high school students who are falling behind and they're credit deficient and how to make that transition. Because right now we're asking them voluntarily and academically to move from the high school to let's say the alternative school. At some point we're going to have to say if your child is not you know, on the level to go from, let's say, 9th grade to 10th grade, then we're going to have to move them all. And then that'll help us a little bit, I think. With the understanding that the parents understand that it flows. And as soon as their child catches up, then they can move back into the regular high school, as opposed to being the alternative. And I think at some point, you're talking about 100 students sometimes. It's many. It's always been something that I know Member Thomas and I have been dealing with it for years. You know, how to do that in a way where it works.

[3146] SPEAKER_25: I think that's something we can work with your assistant superintendent of education, because they're going to be, they're going to know where the weaknesses are throughout the district, by the tests that they take, you know, where the needs are at.

[3158] SPEAKER_31: They need to balance it with that. Yeah, we need to look at that. I just want to add, because I think it is important that maybe we do increase the class size, But based on your numbers, Member Rodriguez, I think we can't go too high, especially if we are below, which is at 22, 24 sounds reasonable, 25. I think going 27 for some classes, especially K through 3, it could impact their studies.

[3184] Nancy Thomas: Well, I think that one of the issues is that we can't negotiate in time to do anything about any class grouping except K through 3. And so that's only a certain small percentage of our overall students. So I don't see where we're going to be able to get very much money out of K-3 unless we... Right.

[3206] SPEAKER_25: No, you really, we're seeing it at the higher levels. Yeah, because it's... Yes, I mean the lower grades should have the lower class sizes because you do a class size reduction plan. When you look at the high school getting practically the same staffing and actually better at times, that needs to be looked at. But what educational needs we have to look at are those grades too.

[3228] Elisa Martinez: So yeah, so I think we really want to be careful with, you know, I think it should be X number. It's the, you know, there's a math associated with it, but at the end of the day, we are now, we've gotten ourselves into a performance issue as well in our district.

[3244] SPEAKER_25: And that means not as many people are going to come to the district. Exactly. And so we need to serve the educational needs because that is the mission. I mean, that's basically. Something you have to do.

[3256] Elisa Martinez: Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, so I think we've all, yeah, for sure it's, you know, that balance number. And I'm sorry if I'm hogging the conversation, but the clock is right here and I know we need to end soon. But I know that a topic that's, of course, very contentious is a combination of or collapsing of schools, if you will. What is the assessment of our footprint to our needs, right? Because we're just talking right now the actual head count. But then there's the operating expenses that go along with it. And I know that folks have kind of shied away from the topic because the sense of it's a contentious topic. It is our reality. I don't know. I think somebody had asked me, am I pro shutting out of school? I think that's a silly question. Of course, I'm not pro. None of us are pro that. But we need to understand what that is because In our meetings, we need to share that, and we collectively need to make a decision, right? And it's not anybody's preference, but we need to kind of have the facts on the table. So I think that is going to be, right? I mean, Nancy, you and I spoke about this a couple of meetings ago. And we've got to get that data, guys. And if we don't, because otherwise we can't have the conversation.

[3332] Nancy Thomas: We have some ballpark numbers of how much we can save. And those are jobs that we would lose that aren't in the classroom with kids. And I think if anything, we want to preserve the classroom staffing.

[3347] SPEAKER_31: Do you guys, if you guys do give us the numbers in regards to shutting down the school, do you guys also give us projected numbers in regards to how that's going to affect maybe students leaving the district in general as well?

[3360] SPEAKER_25: We can look at that and see, but one of the things when you close a school, a lot of times, you're still going to have staff members, maybe you're sitting in a specialized program. I mean, special education could be one of them. You could take in some things to bring to school.

[3372] Bowen Zhang: How are you? I want to ask you about the room for the charter school. If you shut on a school, will the charter come in? They will.

[3379] SPEAKER_25: It's very likely, that's why it's... They are likely to come in.

[3381] Elisa Martinez: Very likely. Yeah, but I think that that's it. We've got to understand the different scenarios because Yeah, I mean, if we leave an empty building, right? So it's a strategic decision, right?

[3393] Nancy Thomas: And I think there's trends in the state that we should be following, like the charter schools are going to be under increasing pressure to follow the same rules that public schools do. There's legislation going down, so that's going to be a little bit of a deterrent for charter schools. The fact that charter school openings have declined or are stagnant You know, it might not be as bad as during the big rush for charter schools. So we have to kind of find out locally who would be interested in a charter school and how likely it would be if we closed the school.

[3432] SPEAKER_31: I think it's also very important to take into consideration, though, that if we are trying to increase enrollment, if we're going to shut down the school, and then doing efforts to increase enrollment, where are we going to put those students as well? So that also needs to be taken into consideration. And if we're going to be exercising so many activities and trying to bring kids in, bring kids in, and all of a sudden that actually does work. And we now we don't have the facilities to put them in. So we also have to take that into consideration.

[3456] Nancy Thomas: And we lost some kids when we merged the two schools. We lost some families. And do we know how many we lost? And that could be indicative of how many we might lose if we close schools or consolidate.

[3470] Elisa Martinez: And the key is just getting that comprehensive picture, right? I think that's what we're saying is we, you know, we can help provide guidance, but we need the facts. Until what time are we limited? Until 6?

[3489] SPEAKER_22: I think we can do it in 45 minutes. Okay.

[3492] SPEAKER_28: So before we go to the next meeting, can we, I would like for us to have another meeting possibly next week so that way we can work together as a team with board members to find some solutions to our structural deficit. So would it be possible for us to meet next week, whether it's in the evening or during the daytime?

[3513] Bowen Zhang: Probably before Thursday, because next Thursday night, I think Arthur will be flying out from San Diego.

[3519] Elisa Martinez: I cannot join in person. I mean, I'm going to be back east for business, so I cannot be present. But I could potentially try to be on the phone.

[3528] SPEAKER_31: Definitely a Monday through Wednesday. Wednesday? Monday through Wednesday. Monday through Wednesday. Monday is a holiday. Monday is a holiday. All right, so Tuesday, Wednesday. Tuesday, Wednesday, and we'll do a conference meeting.

[3539] Nancy Thomas: I have an ROP meeting from 4 to 5, but after that. So if it's in the evening, it's easier for me.

[3545] SPEAKER_22: Could you do it during the day, Wednesday?

[3549] Ray Rodriguez: Probably looking at Wednesday about maybe 5. 5 o'clock? So you can get back from the ROP meeting.

[3557] Nancy Thomas: I think the ROP meeting is Tuesday, not Wednesday, but yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Tuesday. So maybe Wednesday, but because the new board members are leaving on Thursday.

[3574] Ray Rodriguez: But Wednesday sounds like it's probably going to be fine.

[3577] SPEAKER_22: Just the study session. Yes. Right. OK. And you'll be here? Can you be here?

[3582] Michael Milliken: Yeah. OK.

[3586] SPEAKER_22: Let's say five to seven.

[3589] Elisa Martinez: I may not join, but I mean, obviously, if you all can join, that's.

[3592] Ray Rodriguez: No, no, I agree. How about Tuesday? Can we do Tuesday at five?

[3597] SPEAKER_28: Five to seven, two hours.

[3599] Elisa Martinez: So that'll be East Coast time. So that'll be eight. I could do that. OK, I don't know. On Wednesday.

[3608] Ray Rodriguez: Do you know your meeting?

[3611] SPEAKER_31: Do you want to check on that?

[3615] Nancy Thomas: I'm almost positive it's Tuesday, from 4 to 5. So before 5.30, you know.

[3622] Ray Rodriguez: 5.30? Sorry. Tuesday, 5.30? Is that okay? Do we start at 5 or?

[3627] Nancy Thomas: Well, if you start at 5.30, I can get here in 5.30. Yeah, let's do 5.30.

[3631] Ray Rodriguez: Okay. Problem. 5.30. 5.30. Special meeting. You want to go?

[3644] Ray Rodriguez: Would that give you enough time to give us some more of a breakdown on the pluses and minuses of school closure?

[3653] SPEAKER_22: Well, we're going to work with her together to look at some of those elements of school consolidation.

[3660] SPEAKER_31: Is it only school consolidation, or are we looking at other factors?

[3662] SPEAKER_22: Well, all the stuff you brought so far. Breaking down the number and pointing to school consolidation options and implications. I think we asked questions about demographic studies and projections. My whole overall thing that I like that you said the most is preserving programmatic things over everything else, even if we have to short-streak everything. Because if we start eroding that, it's going to have a downward spiral effect. It's a tipping point where we won't get people coming in.

[3693] Nancy Thomas: I would like this to seriously consider looking at adult programs separate. We spent one-time money starting up two relatively expensive programs, and one of them is our induction program. That's for new teachers. Oftentimes, new teachers have to pay for their own induction. We pay for everything, and we subsidize others. And then there's the whole CE3 evaluator. It's costing us money. almost the distraction for teachers and staff and it's an adult program. So, you know, maybe these programs that we started up when we thought we had a lot of one-time money to do this kind of thing or we took a grant. They're still operating but they're not operating efficiently and they're costing us money. So I would really like to look at that. And even things like our sports program, our athletic program is extremely expensive compared to other other districts and it it's very important to our community so we've got to be careful but maybe there are sports that we need to say we can't we can no longer have a golf program we can no longer have some of these low high cost but low participation sports.

[3779] SPEAKER_22: So let me stop right there because we're hedging on something negotiable. of any non-K-12 programming we should look at, which includes adult ed and some of the things that we mentioned.

[3792] Elisa Martinez: So we have to be a little bit careful. Any ideas around revenue generating programs that maybe Dublin wasn't in need for additional reps, but in your experience, what are some additional approaches to grants and whatnot, you know, how do we begin to have that capability ourselves as well.

[3820] SPEAKER_25: Yeah, I talked about some of the things, is literally at this point in a district, you need to look at special education where your contributions are very large. You know, there's things you can do with your SELPA to save everybody money throughout. So SELPA would be a big opportunity. Another big opportunity are seeking out certain grants that will help you support programmatic needs. I mean, as you start, and this district has to be I mean, you've got to reduce staffing. That's why your class sizes are so low. It's a problem, and you've got to just look at it straight, because you're going to try to increase the educational program. And, you know, when you have a high school with everybody practically, some of them are lower than 25. I said, how does that happen at the middle school? How does that happen in high school? Maybe you have a few classes that are lower to run certain specialties. But across the board, it's nothing like that. Nobody has.

[3881] SPEAKER_31: I mean, except you.

[3883] Elisa Martinez: Huh? So yeah, so we should be performing above everybody else, given that. So anyhow, we have other issues.

[3893] SPEAKER_22: And I agree with the philosophy, like education-wise. If we're going to have large class sizes, it should be in secondary, not primary. We all kind of agree with that.

[3903] Bowen Zhang: So I want to follow up on Member Martinez for comments about revenue. Are we the only school district without a parcel tax in Alameda County? Or are there other districts that have?

[3914] SPEAKER_28: You don't need a parcel tax. We need a parcel tax? Yeah.

[3917] Bowen Zhang: But are we the only district in Alameda without a parcel tax? That's correct.

[3920] Leonor Rebosura: I didn't know that.

[3922] SPEAKER_28: Some of them have it on them. And with your approval, Mr. Sanchez, we'll have a financial consultant coming in to present into a parcel tax.

[3935] Bowen Zhang: And it needs two-thirds majority. That's correct.

[3938] Elisa Martinez: Yeah, it's a harder. I will say, myself, as a citizen, I have a hard time. I mean, we need to do our due diligence to earn that parcel tax. I'm excited. I just don't think that.

[3953] Nancy Thomas: It's not been generous in the past. We tried one parcel tax. It only made 49%. And the two bargaining units were neutral on it.

[3962] SPEAKER_25: No one, you know. Not uncommon. They often are not.

[3967] Elisa Martinez: So yeah, until we, I think we start to show that the financial, I'm not sure if it's responsible, but the structure, I think we could potentially start entertaining. I would have a hard time trying to sell that.

[3981] Ray Rodriguez: It's got to be very, very specific. And you have to go to a certain target population. But years ago, we tried like heck to try to get that percentage down from two-thirds down to 55% or whatever. It just didn't work.

[4001] Ray Rodriguez: Now on the school consolidation, when you're looking at that, could you

[4024] SPEAKER_22: to help us figure out what did we lose in the Balkan-Illini merger. Knowing that number would be helpful for this.

[4031] Ray Rodriguez: And those schools are pretty close, so, you know, I mean, they're right next door.

[4035] Elisa Martinez: And you probably, I mean, you probably have a ton of experience, but I know, I mean, if we think about Redwood City, we think about Oakland, we think there's a bunch of work that's been done already, so I don't think we have to go reinvent the wheel to understand all the critical dimensions, right? But then, obviously,

[4056] Nancy Thomas: two schools, Redwood City, four schools. Evergreen is looking at cutting schools. San Jose was looking at cutting up to four schools. So all these districts around us that are experiencing declining enrollment are doing this process. So we have good examples of how they've done it, how they've included the community to tamp down the concerns that might drive people away.

[4086] SPEAKER_31: I just have a big concern if we have such so many new homes being built and our goal is to have those families be enrolled in our schools and we're not going to have schools for them now.

[4100] Ray Rodriguez: Well first we have to find a way to identify how many kids are actually in there. Maybe have a better public that are moving in there.

[4111] SPEAKER_22: Do they have any kids? We're going to have a closed mess. We've got a lot of time in there too.

[4118] Elisa Martinez: But if you have further emails, please send them to me or Shukachar and we'll get them to her. I think it would be good to include staffs because, you know, we have a ton of capacity and then we have I think we need to decide like we have the land that's been set aside, right? If we were to shoot, I mean, I don't know.

[4140] SPEAKER_28: We'll talk more.

[4142] SPEAKER_25: We can definitely talk with the demographer, but I think he needs to offer you more scenarios so you can plan for. They need to give you options.

[4158] SPEAKER_25: You came on the board? the year I left. It was your first year.

[4190] SPEAKER_35: Thank you.

No minutes available.