As our community grapples with a deepening school district budget crisis, the conversation has devolved into a bitter, polar debate over who does or does not support school consolidation. Our current struggle is not, fundamentally, about whether anyone wants to close schools or not. Nobody wants to consolidate schools.
It is about consequences, and who is bearing them.
When a school district, or any other large organization, is structurally overspending its budget, wishful thinking will not balance the ledger.
There are only two ways out of a financial deficit: you must either increase revenue or cut costs.
The Limits of Revenue Generation
To the school board’s credit, internal political arguments have not stopped successive members from fighting aggressively for new funding. Through hard-won parcel taxes and Measures I and J, local leaders have increased revenue far beyond what anyone plugged into the district thought possible when measure CC failed to pass in 2010.
Yet, it is still not enough to close the gap between state funding and our ongoing, increasing expenses. Supporters of public education—myself included—may argue that public schools deserve the same robust financial investment as elite private institutions like Polytechnic or Harvard-Westlake. But let’s get real: asking California taxpayers to match private school tuition rates is an idealistic hurdle that we simply aren’t going to clear. At least, not today.
Alternatively, we can look to our physical assets and attempt to generate revenue from district-owned property. While we absolutely need to maximize these assets, doing so runs into an immediate wall of political and logistical reality:
• The Timeline: Reorganizing and leasing public property takes years of bureaucratic and political maneuvering, the bulk of which is actually outside the direct control of our local leadership. Even when taking advantage of changes in California law to streamline the process (for example, the staff housing project currently underway), it takes years to go from concept to execution (7 years and counting between inception and collecting rent, for that project).
• The Neighborhood Pushback: Commercializing or repurposing a closed neighborhood school very often draws intense local ire. Residents who kept their neighborhood schools often support this, but neighbors of closed schools want specific community use cases that will not generate top-dollar revenue. This is no coincidence, and supporters should consider how much of their support might disappear overnight if the school being turned into commercial property was the one in their neighborhood, instead of that one across town being resisted by those neighbors.
• The Tenant Dilemma: To make real money, you often must rent or sell facilities to organizations that can pay market rate, and when the facilities are designed as schools this means the highest rent payers will often unsurprisingly be other educational entities. But renting a district school facility to a competing school tenant ultimately causes some drain of students and therefore funding from our own classrooms. Releasing it to non-school entities would require massive capital to repurpose or remove the buildings and redevelop the property, which lowers the potential return, and runs directly into fierce opposition from everyone green space advocates to historical preservation groups. Since the City Council must ultimately approve rezoning of any property within the city limits, this leads to tensions between PUSD and the City.
Advocates may argue that the district has not done enough to explore these options. This is easy enough to claim, of course, but few have concrete plans, or even acknowledge the time and resources required to accomplish these goals. Opponents often argue that as public land, closed schools should not be turned into facilities that neighbors don’t want, but it is the obligation of the PUSD Trustees under state law to use the resources of the school district for the benefit of the students of PUSD, not to give away as community space, regardless of how beneficial the alternative uses may be.
The Painful Reality of Cutting Costs
If revenue approaches alone cannot patch the holes, we are forced to look at the spending side of the ledger. Our budget is driven by structural costs, and if we want meaningful savings, we have to look at the largest line items.
First, we could freeze or cut staff salaries, our single largest expenditure. To put it bluntly, this means telling our educators and our support staff that raises are off the table for the foreseeable future. I do not support this, and I suspect the majority of our community doesn’t either. But if that is your solution, you must be honest enough to make that case publicly, and you need to acknowledge the other indirect costs you’re demanding the community bear. Very often as an elected official I heard, “Well, if they can’t afford to live in Pasadena they should live elsewhere” from the same people who complain “local traffic is out of control.”
Second, we could target our second-largest line item: contracted services, which mostly consist of support services for Special Education (SPED). Cutting costs here means failing to deliver on agreed-upon Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). Anyone who talks to SPED parents knows we do not do “too much” for these children. While we can and should realize savings by bringing some of these services back in-house, it represents a small percentage in a very large bucket. Abandoning these students may be the strategy of districts that supported the gutting the Office of Civil Rights; it is not who we are.
Third, we look to the perennial crowd-pleaser: cutting central office overhead. While cutting administration is wildly popular among parents and teachers in theory, the reality is that much of what the central office does is legally mandated by state and federal governments. We cannot eliminate positions tasked with compliance. We need people to fingerprint volunteers under Megan’s Law, we need Title IX officers, we have to have a Business Office that processes paychecks. This means that the first services to be cut at the Central Office are not the folks who work on the LCAP or other mandatory activities, but the frontline workers in the Family Resource Center or other programs that many of our most disadvantaged students rely upon.
Fourth, there is cutting “optional” services at school sites. This is the option we have currently forced ourselves into, by failing to balance the budget using any of the previous solutions. The district is cutting teachers who support special programs, reducing support services for those programs, cutting community assistants, cutting athletics options, the list goes on and on. These cuts are already happening now, and I argue that these cuts – when taken as a whole – disproportionately impact our most vulnerable students. I am a strong supporter of some of our special academic programs, but they are far less effective when they are understaffed, and to be blunt the cuts to community assistants matter more to our long term English learners and Title I kids.
Finally, the last option is to reduce the overhead cost at school sites. The simple fact is that operating a school site, at all, requires numerous expenditures from the principal to the office staff to the nurses and health clerks to the lunch ladies and custodians. Every operational school site spreads the bulk of those costs across the student enrollment. Although it is an over-simplification to say “more kids on fewer sites always results in economies of scale”, it is also true that school sites have very few optimal sizes that correspond to how many kids fit at which grade levels. Your choices are to change the number of grades at any one site, or to put enough kids at each site that each class is close to a reasonable ratio for each teacher. No matter how you frame this, it is in effect school consolidation.
Facing the Music
In a nutshell, we have leveraged traditional local tax options, property revenue is a political minefield without short-term yields, and cutting staff pay or vital student services is morally and operationally unacceptable.
Moreover, our current budgetary struggles are occurring when the state of California is doing reasonably well, economically. California’s budget cycle is one of dips and peaks, and because of the mechanisms of Proposition 98, the impact of any economic downturn falls hardest on public education. Although the state budget is not at a peak by any means, we are also overdue for a moderate recession, and the state and national indicators are not particularly sanguine.
If we do not take significant steps to prepare for an economic downturn we will be faced with even more dire decisions, and in the very near future. Of course, even should we take those steps now, we will still have struggles in the future when the economic downturn happens, and people who endlessly criticize the school district will point to those struggles and say we didn’t do enough.
If we are to protect our most critical students, we are left with a math problem that refuses to disappear.
We cannot have these hard conversations if advocates on any side infer malicious motives or lack of care from those pointing out the deficit and the options. If we want to keep our school district on sound footing, we must stop hiding from the consequences of math.
Patrick Cahalan is a former PUSD Board Member.
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