School Finance Facts

Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About School Finance but were Too Lazy to Look Up

Who decides how much funding education receives?
• Every year, the governor draws up a budget, due in June, that decides the fate of most funding for public education. It’s a big deal.
• The state legislature has to approve the budget before it can go into effect. We can influence the final say on the education budget if we can convince legislators to go to bat for us.

Where does educational funding come from?


Where does the money go?
Here’s a breakdown of how California high school districts spent their moolah in the 2004-05 school year:



How much does California spend on each student?
School districts get money from the state based on the Average Daily Attendance (ADA) of students. For example, I only made it to 160 days of the 180 in the school year-- 150/180=0.833. I only went to 83% of school days, so the school district will only get 83% of the money. If I had gone every day, the district would have gotten $8,074 for me; since I invented 30 days’ worth of rare illnesses, it will only receive $6,701.

California districts spend on average $8,074 per ADA (not including the cost of buildings and facilities).

• When this figure is adjusted to account for the crazy high cost of living in California, other states spend more per student—Texas, 12% more; Florida, 18% more; New York, 75% more; the rest of the country, 30% more.
• There’s a big disparity in how the state funds different districts—the difference can be up to $1,000 per student.
• Richer school districts (with higher property values per student) get more local facility funding than low-income areas—sometimes a gap of more than $10,000 per student.
• Resources for special needs students also need to be taken into account: 10% of all students need special education services, and 25% of all students are English learners.

How much do teachers make in California?

• The average teacher’s salary in 2002-03 was $56,283, the highest in the nation (let’s not forget that California rent requires the sale of one’s firstborn).
• California also has the second-worst staff to student ratio in the nation, at 20 to 1. The national average is about 15.8 to 1.

What's the story with these budget cuts you guys keep talking about?
In January, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed cutting $4.8 billion from California schools to help the state balance its books. The state is in the red because the economy headed south and it collected less in taxes than it had expected. $400 million of the total was to be cut from the current school year budget, but $4.4 billion is to be slashed from the budget for 2008-09. That's the equivalent of:

• laying off 107,000 teachers
• increasing class sizes as much as 35%
• cutting classroom funding (for books, computers and supplies) by as much as $24,000 per classroom
• dismissing school more than a month early for every school in the state

The Right To Learn Campaign is organizing the Day of Action on April 18 to protest against these cuts. With more than 10,000 of us speaking out on the same day, we can influence legislators and encourage them to find another way to balance the budget this year. If you haven't signed up already, sign up now to lead a Day of Action at your school.

How has the Williams Settlement Legislation helped with money spent on education?
The lowest-scoring schools in California (those that scored 1, 2 or 3 on a 10-point academic performance scale) receive the most help from the Williams Settlement.

• Students in low-performing schools received more than 80,000 new textbooks and instructional materials.
• Almost 3,000 emergency repairs were funded through the $800 million Emergency Repair Program (ERP). My personal favorites are:
  • "Extensive termite damage created structural hazard”: $101,373
  • "Pigeons roosting in shade supports; waste poses health hazard”: $15,766
  • "Rodent infestation in athletic fields causing trip hazards”: $1,608 o “Killer bees in a wall”: $1,325
  • "Attending school without fearing the next plague of vermin”: Priceless
• Does your school have one book for every five students, or do you to take your life in your hands to go to the bathroom? Go here, fill out a complaint form and do something about it.
  

What’s the bottom line?

• California classrooms are overcrowded and underfunded compared to the rest of the country.
• All school districts don’t receive the same funding—factors such as race, income and special needs (special education and English learners, for example) come into play.
• Money is not the only problem; the system itself is flawed and needs to be examined. We need to ask ourselves, “How can we change this system to better serve all of California’s students?”