School Board to Vote on Interim Budget

If recently elected Pasadena Board of Education members were expecting a honeymoon period after being sworn into office, they can forget about it as the board will take up the certification of the district’s first interim budget.

The newly constituted board will meet at 2 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 10.

“Based on available information and analyses completed by staff utilizing October 31, 2020 expenditure data as approved by the Board of Education, the District is expected to meet the 3% reserve requirement in 2020-2021, 2021-2022, and 2022-2023,” according to a staff report.

“The big, big item that the staff wants to highlight is on the first page of the PowerPoint, which says positive first interim certification,” said current Board President Scott Phelps. “Positive means you have more than the required reserves in the current and out years.”

However, there are some concerns.

One is funding this year and next year will be based on last year’s enrollment, on which state funding is based, without attendance factored in due to legislation passed because of the coronavirus.

That model has some board members worried about 2022-2023, when the budget will have to account for an enrollment decrease of 700 students, which could result in massive layoffs and possible school closures.

The budget also contains $19 million in one-time funding from COVID-19 relief funds. Phelps said the district is stretching out those funds for as many years as possible.

According to the powerpoint presentation Phelps spoke of, the district remains concerned about unsustainable deficit spending, rising special education costs, the food service fund, and the self-insurance fund.

According to the budget, $7 million in one-time funds are being used to pay the custodial staff.

But stretching those dollars could just be putting off the inevitable.

“When you shift your costs from being paid for by regular revenue to being paid for by all this wonderful one-time funding that the government gave, because of COVID, well, then you can stretch your regular funding for several years. What that does is it avoids the need to make tough decisions about downsizing staff. What we don’t really say enough is we’re a very large employment agency and we want to preserve jobs.

“If you avoid these tough decisions, then what happens is sooner or later, the board is presented with even tougher decisions, which are to close schools, right? Because, when you close schools, then the staff feels like, well, we can lay off those people because the school doesn’t exist anymore.”

In 2018, the Los Angeles County Office of Education directed the district to submit a “Fiscal Stabilization Plan” last November outlining how the district planned to cut more than $10 million from its budget over the next three years.

The county threatened the possibility of a fiscal takeover of the school district in January 2018, when it found the district was not on track to meet a state-required minimum “reserve for economic uncertainty” of 3 percent of its total operating budget each year.