If voters fail to pass the tax initiative proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown on the November ballot, some school districts may have to shorten the school year to 160 days. Below is cartoonist Tom Meyer’s take.
via Cartoonist Tom Meyer on California’s shrinking school year – by Tom Meyer.
Whatever its other attributes or deficiencies may be, Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax increase on the November ballot would make the state budget more dependent on personal income taxes and on the relative handful of wealthy Californians who pay most of those taxes.
By the state’s own numbers, income taxes would rise to well over 60 percent of general fund revenues in the just-enacted 2012-13 budget, about twice their proportion when Brown was governor three decades ago.
So, one might ask, what’s wrong with that?
Income taxes are more volatile – i.e., they rise and fall more frequently and more steeply – than other taxes, especially income taxes on the wealthy because their incomes are tied more to stocks and other capital markets, rather than salaries.
Polling data (here for example) consistently shows that K-12 education is Californians’ highest state budget priority. Indeed, Gov. Jerry Brown plans to put those beliefs to the test with a $7 billion tax initiative on the November ballot aimed at resolving the state’s chronic budget problems. This initiative will hold education funding hostage, threatening $5.5 billion in K-12 cuts if voters don’t approve the new taxes.
On top of the Brown tax initiative, Molly Munger’s initiative would provide $10 billion annually in new revenues for schools and preschool/early education programs. So voters will get to weigh in not once, but twice on how strongly they want to protect K-12 education.
While this year’s budget may prioritize K-12 education – on the condition that voters are willing to raise taxes – most past budgets have not. In fact, the budget that Gov. Brown signed last month basically left in place the damage done to school budgets over the last several years, and further back.
via If K-12 matters most, why doesn’t state budget reflect this?.
The lawsuit that civil rights attorney Molly Munger has filed, alleging that Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax increase ballot measure was given preferential treatment over her rival tax proposal, is important unto itself.
She’s challenging a bill that Brown and the Legislature enacted to elevate the governor’s sales and income tax measure to the top of the November ballot and also election officials’ signature-validation procedures that, she says, gave Brown preferential treatment.
Brown and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature have been pushing – and perhaps tearing – the envelope of what constitutes a legitimate budget “trailer” bill under a 2010 amendment to the state constitution that lowered the budget vote margin from two-thirds to a simple majority.
via Dan Walters: Molly Munger’s lawsuit escalates war against Jerry Brown’s tax measure.
Gov. Jerry Brown knows that it’s difficult to persuade California voters to raise taxes, even those they may not pay themselves, as rejection of a new cigarette tax this month underscores.
In fact, polls indicate that his chances of winning approval of his multibillion-dollar sales and income tax measure in November are, at this moment, no better than 50-50.
As he fashioned the 2012-13 budget, therefore, he wanted to impress voters that he’s being tight with their money – hence, his public squabbling with Democrats over services for the poor, his furloughs for state workers, his agency reorganization and his pleas for pension reform.
via Dan Walters: Is California’s budget now relatively lower than during the Reagan era?.
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Call it a last-minute clarification or a June surprise, another piece of bad news: A trailer bill that the Legislature will vote on Wednesday permits districts to slash the school year by an additional three weeks for the next two years, if voters reject Gov. Brown’s tax increase in November. That’s twice what Gov. Jerry Brown seemed to suggest in the May budget revise when he proposed the elimination of 15 days divided over a two-year period. Instead, the Legislature is prepared to authorize a 160-day year, likely the lowest in the nation and far behind other advanced nations; nearly all states have a 180-day year, which California also required before 2010.
In one sense, nothing has changed. Brown hasn’t suggested less funding for schools than the $53.6 billion for 2012-13 that the Legislature approved in passing the budget last week. Districts will have to negotiate a shorter year with their unions; they can’t declare it unilaterally, and most districts won’t go that low.
But the language in AB 1476 (section 50, midway through a very long bill) is a stark message that a defeat of the tax increase will create more than a one-year revenue crisis for schools.
via Not one, but two 160-day minimum years – by John Fensterwald – Educated Guess.
Before the Great Recession, California schools were required to provide 180 days of learning, the national average.
Since 2008, lawmakers have allowed a 175-day school year to save money.
Now, if voters reject the tax initiative in November, lawmakers and the governor are proposing a trigger-cut to allow school districts to reduce the number of school days even more – to 160 days, for two years. It’s part of a trailer bill expected to be in print by Monday.
That’s a terrible idea, but what big money-saving options are left? Laying off more teachers and packing 40 or more students into classrooms, like sardines?
By 12:20 p.m. Tuesday, the children and a few mothers gathered in small clusters under shade-giving sycamore trees in the cul-de-sac on Scoggins Court in Vacaville.
Residents of Lincoln Corner, a Section 8 housing area, or from a nearby mobile home park, they kept an eager eye out for the large, white Father’s House van they have come to know since June 11, when the Vacaville Unified School District’s annual summer feeding program began.
At 12:30, the van, driven by Father’s House volunteer Gene Braden, trundled up the roadway, parked, and Braden, his 17-year-old son, Samuel, also a volunteer, and school district employee Marie Pate set up their small A-frame “Free Lunch” signs in English and Spanish and began handing out the day’s
via School is out, but Vacaville Unified School District, nonprofits ….
ROCKVILLE — The Solano Community College governing board passed its tentative budget Wednesday, one that accounts for the elimination of summer classes, football and water polo and the terminated Solano College Theatre Association contract.
The board voted unanimously to approve the budget for the 2012-13 school year. A public hearing and the official adoption of the budget are scheduled Sept. 5 at a meeting in the board room on the main campus on Suisun Valley Road.
The board did not discuss the budget before its vote, which followed a presentation from Yulian Ligioso, the vice president of finance and administration.
Earl Handa
Fairfield
Teachers and the school board have settled a contract that will help save the district’s extracurricular programs. In addition, the teacher’s settlement, along with the other district union agreements, will bring back some clerical, custodial and library technician positions.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Most teachers go into the profession because they love children. Civilization revolves around our children. If you doubt this, ask any parent holding their newborn child. Ask any grandparent who hears their grandchild utter their first words. Ask any teacher who sees their children’s minds grow. We all know that children are priceless.
Melanie Driver, President, Fairfield-Suisun Unified Teachers Association
Antelope
It has been gratifying to read the coverage of our just-concluded contract negotiations with Fairfield-Suisun School District in the Daily Republic. We are especially appreciative of the comments by Board Member Perry Polk in recognizing the contributions we and all district employees have made to ensure the FSUSD’s students have not only sports and extracurricular activities, but the materials to learn and the support and assistance they need to succeed in classrooms and outside them.
Special praise should be given to the board members and to Superintendent Cottingim-Dias and her administrative team as well. Throughout this difficult spring they did not seek to grandstand or point blame or to gain any political advantage from the negotiations process. Instead they acted with real patience and leadership as we, as a committed community, hashed through the painful choices the state budget mess presented to us.
In an era when education experts are pushing for a longer school year, it is dismaying to see that Vacaville students may be spending less time in the classroom next school year.
Last week, the Vacaville Unified School District approved a budget that calls for five days to be lopped off the 2012-13 school year, while Travis Unified School District decided to trim eight days from its school calendar.
Those decisions are ugly — and completely necessary.
School districts throughout California are faced with an impossible situation. They must adopt balanced budgets by the end of June, even though the state won’t know how much money it will be sending them until after the Nov. 8 election, when voters say yea or nay to a pair of competing tax proposals. By the time that vote is counted, one-third of the school year will be over.
By Peter Schrag
The estimable Joel Fox, former head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and now president of the anti-tax Small Business Action Committee, used to complain vehemently about the tendency of some on the left to blame all of California’s ills on Proposition 13.
Fox, who’s as thoughtful as he is conservative, was – is – partly right. California had plenty of problems even before June 6, 1978. It’s had lots since that didn’t have the remotest connection with Howard Jarvis’ famous stink bomb.
But last week’s budget wrestle in Sacramento was another reminder of how much of our mess was set off by the initiative and the orgy of other ballot measures and related legislative fixes that came in its wake.
The biggest example, bigger even than the Proposition 13 property tax cap, is the requirement that the legislature cannot pass any tax increase without a two-thirds vote – effectively a grant of veto power to any minority party or group, now almost always Republicans, that can muster one third of the votes, plus one, in either house.
Travis Unified leaders have ratified district teachers’ new three-year accord, resulting in eight fewer teaching days, or a 4 percent reduction in pay.
The agreement, saving nearly $700,000, will help lessen the district’s red ink for the 2012-13 academic year.
Approved during the governing board’s Tuesday meeting, it allows the district, one of nine in California with “negative” financial status, to send a balanced budget to the County Office of Education by June 30, as required by law, said Superintendent Kate Wren Gavlak.
The district’s classified employees, or office and maintenance workers, also agreed to a 4 percent pay cut, or eight furlough days, in their new three-year contract, the result of a vote taken Thursday. The accord will land on the desks of trustees for approval at a Tuesday special board meeting at the Travis Education Center in Fairfield. Likely to be approved, it will help to close the 2012-13 budget gap, as revenues are expected to be $38 million and expenditures $39.6 million.
Vacaville Unified School District students will go to class five fewer days this coming school year under an agreement approved Thursday by the board of trustees.
On a 6-0 vote, with Jerry Eaton absent, trustees ratified the 2012-13 collective bargaining agreement offered by the Vacaville Teachers Association, calling for a 6.5 percent reduction in pay, for a savings of $2.64 million.
The reduction is the equivalent of five teaching days, plus a teacher’s minimum day, for a total of six days, said Randy Henry, the 12,000-student district’s chief business officer.
Saying his was thrilled at the teachers’ decision, a 321-37 vote, trustee David McCallum praised the negotiators’ “willingness to come together” and work collaboratively, as the district faces the real possibility of $8.2 million in cuts if the Gov. Jerry Brown’s November tax initiative fails to pass.
via Vacaville Unified School District leaders OK 5 less days, pay cuts.
FAIRFIELD — Travis School District students will go to class eight fewer days next school year under an agreement approved Tuesday by the governing board.
The agreement with the teacher union saves $656,130, reduces teacher pay by 4 percent and helps eat away at the district’s estimated $1.4 million deficit for next year.
Teacher union president Jeanette Wiley on Wednesday said the cut comes on top of four days removed from the school calendar in each of the past three years, for a total of 12 days eliminated; an increase in class size at Golden West Middle School and Vanden High to 39 students; and as expenses for families rise.
“The public doesn’t see the crisis we are in because they see the kids go to school, they see the kids come home from school,” Wiley said. “The teachers are so committed to not letting the kids feel the cuts, I think the public doesn’t understand what a stretch it is for students to do that.”
The state budget that the Legislature will enact this week will assume that half of its deficit will be covered by voter approval of new income and sales taxes next November.
However, it’s looking steadily less like a reasonable assumption and increasingly like just another in a long string of budget gimmicks, not unlike last year’s bogus assumption that the tax system would generate an extra $4 billion.
Indeed, one could say that Gov. Jerry Brown and fellow Democrats are doubling down on miracle money, from last year’s $4 billion to this year’s $8.5 billion.
History does not favor new state taxes. Voters have very rarely approved any new levies and even more rarely any new taxes that they would pay themselves.
California’s 6 million-student public school system is not only the largest chunk of the state budget that will be enacted this week – by far – but the major component of Gov. Jerry Brown’s campaign for sales and income tax increases as well.
And if that isn’t yeasty enough, the governor is also proposing huge changes in the way state school money is calculated and disbursed.
What emerges from all of this is impossible, even for political insiders, to predict.
If all goes as Brown plans, his aides say, California schools will see an average 47 percent increase in financing over the rest of his governorship, assuming it lasts another term.
via Dan Walters: California school aid at center of wrangle over tax measures.
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Voters remain up in the air about passing a statewide tax to help schools, according to recent polls. But given a chance to support local schools exclusively, more than two-thirds of voters in nine school districts said yes – a wide enough margin to pass a parcel tax. Even the four parcel taxes that lost got over 60 percent support and would have passed had the threshold for passage been 55 percent – an idea that’s been kicking around for years but can’t get out of the Legislature for lack of Republican votes. *
Also in Tuesday’s primary, voters in 23 K-12 districts passed nearly $2 billion worth of school construction bonds, a strong commitment in uncertain times. A piece of that money in some districts will go toward upgrading technology, critical as districts move toward implementing Common Core standards with digital textbooks and computer-administered assessments. Bond measures in an additional 11 districts were rejected, although a few came tantalizingly close to the 55 percent needed for approving school bonds.
via Parcel taxes beat the odds – by John Fensterwald – Educated Guess.
With both sides watching budget deadlines, even as the state Legislature haggles over spending priorities and cuts, the Vacaville Teachers Association and Vacaville Unified School District leaders have agreed on a tentative one-year pay and benefits package.
Teachers agreed to a 6.5 percent salary reduction, or six furlough days, if Gov. Jerry Brown’s November tax initiative fails to pass; and to a 3.5 percent reduction, or one furlough day, if it passes, association president Moira McSweeney said during Thursday’s board meeting in the Educational Services Center.
Association members will vote on the agreement in the coming days, she told the trustees, who will place it on the June 14 board agenda for approval/disapproval. If approved, the contract will run from July 1 to June 30, 2013.
via Vacaville Unified School District leaders, teachers agree on ….