First, let’s get this out of the way. Although I like numbers and work with them in my job every day, I’m not an accountant. So don’t expect an in-depth analysis of the current budget crisis facing the Lowell Joint School District and other school districts across California. All I know is what I see on the news and read in the papers and it doesn’t look good.
Funding has been cut to a multitude of public service sectors across the state touching just about everyone in some way. We could probably spend hours discussing the reasons we are in this current situation, but I’m a pretty practical person and I don’t think we are going to be able to fix the state budget from here in Whittier. Let’s leave that up to the politicians in Sacramento and hope they can come to a resolution soon.
Instead, let’s talk about budgets in general. You really only have two parts: revenue and expenses. At the end of the day, your expenses should be less than (or equal to) your revenue. Of course, it’s really more complicated than that as the state puts rules in the budget process that we may not have in our personal budgets at home. (ie. Holding a reserve for a “rainy day” and looking out three years in the future).
As a school district, the majority of our revenue is dependent on state and federal funding. We can see from recent events that despite efforts to the contrary (ie. Prop 98) spending on schools can be cut during tough economic times. The current crisis has resulted in double digit cuts to revenue totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in the next three years.
Think of your own budget. If your income was cut from one year to the next, what would you do?
The other part of a budget is expenses, which for the district is primarily made up of staff salaries and benefits. This is where a large part of the discussion has been centered in the last few board meetings. Passion runs high on both sides because unfortunately, since the revenue side of the budget is not likely to improve, it leaves cutting expenses as a primary option to balancing the budget.
Again, think of your own budget. If you didn’t have enough money to pay your bills this month, what would you do?
It comes down to making some tough decisions that may not always satisfy everyone. The key is to get all parties to work together to find the best options that will support our primary objective which is to provide a well rounded education for all children in the district.
There are things we can do, and the direction the district takes will be determined in the election this November. I think that can help to provide the necessary leadership to bring all the parties back to the table to look at our options and come up with a direction that we can all support. At the end of the day, we all want to get to the same destination, it may just be that the route we used to take doesn’t work anymore and we need to find a new path.
More to come……..
Want to try your hand at balancing the California state budget? Here are a couple of links where you can try. It’s not as easy (or hard) as you think. It just depends on what choices you make.
