Board of Education President Previews Highlights of Thursday’s Meeting

The Board Meeting on March 12th has only two items on the agenda; an emergency declaration and the approval of the second interim budget report.

I will cover the emergency declaration first. The Education Code requires Board approval for many decisions that may come from a Superintendent.

Under normal circumstances this is entirely appropriate, however during emergencies or public health crisis moments the need to follow the process requires a Superintendent to call an emergency meeting to approve several types of actions that may be necessary in the upcoming weeks, from reassigning of personnel from one site to another, to signing a contract for an outside cleaning company specializing in sanitizing possible biohazards, to closing a school under the advice of county health officials.

To remove the possibility of red tape from delaying the response of the district, we are bringing forth a resolution empowering the Superintendent to take actions in response to the public health situation without waiting for Board approval.

Of course we the Board will still be monitoring the actions of the district.

The second item is the second interim budget. This budget has us meeting our required reserves in each of the next three years, subject to budget assumptions that are in line with county standards for approval. We are currently projecting a 500 student decline in enrollment, following the loss that we had at the start of the last two years from our projections. It’s a fairly conservative estimate in normal conditions, but with families getting priced out of Pasadena it is possible that we will come in below that number.

It is, however, also possible that we will come in with more students than we are projecting, and if that occurs we will have to hire teachers at the start of August. This is always a difficult time in staffing determinations, because we don’t want to lay off more staff than we should, but once we pass the March 15th deadline we cannot lay off more staff for the upcoming school year… so if we err on the side of not laying off enough staff, we may be overstaffed next year.

It is always a hard balance to strike between site stability and fiscal responsibility. We also are working off of revenue assumptions, given that it is always possible for California to slip into a recession or for the governor’s proposed January budget to undergo changes before it is approved in June. Unfortunately, we have to forge ahead with our best estimates now, and trust in the state legislature to prioritize state spending sensibly.

This is a fairly routine meeting, albeit one outside of our normal meeting schedule, and only warrants a special meeting itself due to filing deadlines for the second interim budget.

 

Patrick Cahalan
President
Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education