Here's the Scoop...

December 5, 2023

By Todd Maddison - Parent Assn. of Oceanside

The "bad news ahead" we've been hearing about in education funding - the "fiscal cliff" - is about to become more real.

In the first glimpse at a dark financial forecast, the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported Friday that the next California state budget will likely face a three-year $58 billion deficit, on the magnitude of the impact of Great Recession in 2008.

Full analysis by the Legislative Analysts' Office is expected next week.

The last few years have seen incredible amounts of revenue flowing into our schools. That money has obviously not been spent on things that improve education, given the generally miserable academic results.

Instead, a lot of that money has been spent in ways that simply benefit the adults in education, giving them bonus raises to increase their own pay and benefits.

That is not only of course self-serving, but doing that ratchets up the overall cost of labor in a district, making it even harder to survive any downturns in revenue.

Those downturns have been predicted for over a year, yet labor groups continue to insist that districts give them more money "because the district has it", ignoring the implications in the future.

Those implications are clear because we've seen this movie many times before. Shortly we will see layoff notices and cuts to programs for our kids.

All combined with complaints from our education industry that "we don't get enough money from the state", ignoring the fact that when they DID get enough money they did not spend it on our kids but instead spent it on themselves.

Are you watching your district? Are you stepping up at Board Meetings telling them you see what is happening and you're not going to be happy when they start cutting from the education of our kids?

https://edsource.org/updates/legislative-analyst-state-to-face-58-billion-three-year-budget-deficit