I would hope our current School Board finally has figured out that there’s a lot more involved in “Keeping up with Joneses” than just throwing School District savings at a five-year goal and hoping it will be reached. The California School Board Assn. tries to instill in its elected membership that a school district should not spend any onetime money, such as district reserves, to pay for on-going expenditures. By that I mean employees’ salaries or trying to stay competitive by basing your pay scale on what other districts pay even if it is beyond affordability.. But, as you will see, our School Board members chose not to follow this guiding principle of school finance.
A Flaw in Fiscal Strategy
What our School Board could have done — if it had been actually serious about bringing district salaries within the L.A. County median–was to wait each year until the County’s latest annual J-90 salary survey was released for the previous year. Then, after seeing what other districts had done, they could increase their wages accordingly. Instead, it seems the School Board based its District-wide salary raises on guesswork. Looking at their minimal achievement in the past five years, it seems raises were based on very poor financial information.
Follow the Leader
Even though our School District had the 9th highest percentage (17.8) of L.A. County teacher salary increases over the last five years, our District only moved up three steps (44th to 41st) in the county’s average salary rankings. But such grand movements in county rankings envisioned by the union back in 2011-12, were possible. But they come at a much higher cost. In the same time period, after raising their district salaries over 25 percent, Wiseburn USD went from being 4.3 percent below the County median (36th) in 2011-12, to being 4.75 percent above it (8th) in 2015-16.
Comparing 2011-12 to 2015-16 USD Average Salary Surveys
Short-changing Districts
When our governor announced his new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), he said that Culver City Unified, along with other educationally successful districts, would be receiving less in state funding than they had previously under the state’s Block Grant system. Under the block grants, Culver City had received about 98.5 percent of the average funding of other L.A. County unified school districts. Under his new Local Control plan, he showed that our School District would be receiving only 95.4 percent of the average funding—about 3.1 percent less than before. But it turned out the actual amount the our District now receives in state funding would be less than 90 percent of the county average—a $5.65M loss in state funding last year alone.
A Very Costly Experiment
I wonder what the public’s reaction would have been if the union had demanded that teachers’ salaries be raised 25 percent over the next five years instead of suggesting its simplest-sounding goal of aiming for the County median. In hindsight, that’s what it would have taken to reach the County’s median salary—a 25 percent rise. And yet the School Board readily accepted the union’s simple-sounding goal knowing that the District would be receiving a lot less in state funding under the new Local Control plan.
Fiscal Brain Freeze
The community thought it had elected some of its brightest people to be School Board members: A scientist who oversaw a multi-million dollar project for NASA, a lawyer, a retired teacher and a small business owner. But it seems School Board members were not smart enough to heed the public warnings about how difficult it would be to achieve such a salary goal. It also seems they forgot the state School Board’s fiscal precept about spending onetime money or did not ask the right questions of the District’s business office or understand the difficulty of the goal before setting off on this unpredictable fiscal folly.
Not Much to Show
The five-year average raise for the other L.A. County unified school districts was 14.3 percent. Culver City raised its salaries 17.8 percent — just 3.5 percent more. No wonder Culver City’s District employees are still mired more than 7 percent below L.A. County’s median figure.
Living in River City
The Teachers Union leadership said that their members felt underappreciated because they were not being paid fairly at the County’s median salary. Actually what they wanted most was more money.
The District unions took advantage of the District administration, of School Board members and especially of a superintendent quite sympathetic to their supposed plight. Board members were so enamored with then-Supt. David La Rose’s inspirational song and dance, that they let him lead them down the primrose path in putting almost half of the District’s onetime savings down this fiscal rabbit hole. Thereby they ended up with little to show for spending millions of dollars of onetime savings on District-wide raises.
Mr. Laase may be contacted at GMLaase@aol.com