Bigger picture

So yesterday’s post was a micro look at what AUSD is dealing with but today’s post is the wider problem which exists for the school district that, understandably, a lot of families simply don’t know about or don’t care about because — for the wide majority of us — we will spend (and expect other people) to spend anything to ensure that our kids are well served. However, the role of the school district is to make sure the money we have, stretches. This exercise of discussing winding down Bay Farm Middle or ASTI or reexamining the innovative programs is not done lightly because, look, in the past School Boards have been held hostage by the need to go for parcel tax after parcel tax and avoiding angering families who vote was worth kicking the can down the road. We can talk about the need to fix funding at the State level and, definitely, that work should be done but it doesn’t help AUSD in the short run when AUSD is projected to dip into its reserves every year to fund all these nice to haves and, in three years, is projected to have a sub $1 million reserve eating away millions of dollars every year in reserves.

There are a few things that can be done, we can go out for another parcel tax or we can look at programs and school sites which have been untouchable in the past. Parcel taxes are notoriously hard to pass because of the high percentage rate required for passage and there becomes a certain amount of fatigue for voters who normally would support our schools but then begin to question why the District can’t seem to live within the budget allotted to AUSD,

So what is costly in the district? Well, certainly the innovative programs which exist. Currently the non Title 1 schools are using unrestricted general fund money to fund these programs on top of their ADA but, my criticism back when these were approved at two of the wealthiest and most resourced schools in the District back in 2011-2012 was that the “innovative” programs should have been reserved to help shore up declining enrollment and neither of these schools were suffering from that.

What else costs a lot of money, is, honestly, our small neighborhood schools. Yes, they are what makes Alameda special but they are expensive. We’ve had the conversation about shuttering small schools again and again and every single time we kick the can down the road because we’re trying to pass a parcel tax or we get “lucky” with a school site like Lum having seismic safety issues.

We need to have a difficult conversation about the goals of this district, if it is to appease every parent who believes their child is a special and distinct case that needs a school specifically designed for them then there may not be an AUSD in three years to serve anyone let alone these special and distinct children. If the goals of the district is to serve all kids and address the clear populations that the district have failed year after year it appears that these new strategic plans are designed to do just that. No parent wants their kid to be left behind but some communities seem okay with allowing other communities to go without so that their schools can have more.

And therein lies the problem of this specific discussion just around BFMS, it ignores the reality the district as a whole is in. It’s easy to “save” one school site’s special program but it then requires the school district to cut from other programs and the easiest thing is always to cut from school sites whose community doesn’t have the time to organize a mass response in a short amount of time. This is going to be an uncomfortable conversation but we’ve avoided it for so long because it is uncomfortable and no one wants less for their children.