Oakland Unified School District’s current fiscal challenges, which are its own making and resulting from such practices as chronic overspending, are about to get worse over the next few years.
The district has no savings account. If it maintains its current programs and spending, it will see an approximately $9 million deficit in 2019-20, and a $17 million deficit in 2020-21. Of course, before that happens, the state will likely take control of the district – again — and make drastic changes.
The calls for OUSD to “chop from the top” won’t fix the district’s financial woes. But they will always be seductive when our community lacks clarity about the cause of the shortfalls, the true state of the district’s finances and the effects of whatever cuts are made.
But with disciplined, courageous leadership, adoption of national best practices and transparent partnership with the community, OUSD can survive this crisis and ultimately thrive.
For the past few years, districts statewide have seen their expenses and funding increase. In the coming years, those expenses will continue increasing, but funding will flatten out and possibly even decrease. For example, special education costs have skyrocketed, but state funding has been flat.
Pensions are a similar challenge. From 2014-24, school districts will see their contributions to the state’s pension fund triple. Over the past four years alone, the amount of money OUSD had to pay into employee retirement plans doubled from $19 million to $39 million. To offset these rising costs, districts need to make cuts elsewhere.
So what does this mean for Oakland public schools?
In our last East Bay Times piece on OUSD’s budget woes, we called for strong leadership from the school board and superintendent, working in true partnership with the community.
Going forward, OUSD will need to adopt the best available district-level budgeting practices from across the country. Rather than reinventing the wheel, they need to look at the Smarter School Spending Framework created by the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA). This framework calls for marrying educational excellence with fiscal sustainability, a known area of difficulty for OUSD over the years.
The GFOA framework lays out the conditions necessary to not only fix the budgeting basics like poor internal controls, but to create a system truly focused on student impact. The framework will press OUSD to focus on (1) getting the most out of each dollar; (2) limiting priorities; and (3) making conscious, strategic decisions.
In an era that will no doubt call for cuts and other changes, the framework features the kind of transparency and focus on students for which Oaklanders have longed. During the last crisis, residents were frustrated by the lack of accessible information about the central administrative office.
Given the size of the coming fiscal challenges, OUSD cannot simply chop from the top to avoid state receivership.
The board and superintendent must make hard, courageous and necessary decisions. As pension costs rise, what gets cut? What innovation needs to happen to sustainably provide an excellent education to all special education students? How can the use of facilities be maximized to best serve students?
The board and superintendent will need the community’s support as they make these decisions. They must show the kind of transparency, rigor, and discipline the framework requires.
Absent disciplined leadership, adoption of national best practices and transparent partnership with the community, it will be difficult to understand if the district is making the right choices for our students.
Marc Tafolla is policy director GO Public Schools Oakland, a non-profit that seeks to expand access to quality education in underserved communities.
