One of the stranger concepts that I have been exposed to since taking public office is the notion of the “furlough” day. This essentially means that public agencies tell their employees not to come into work a certain number of days so that they can reduce their pay proportionally. Often such terms need [...]
Another area of public school governance which is incredibly confusing and counterintuitive is the collective bargaining process. I originally posted in February that the District and the teachers’ union (SCTA) has reached “impasse.” Since then, I have written muliple posts regarding our financial crisis. The bottom line is that there is [...]
At last night’s Board Meeting, the Superintendent and CBO outlined the current state of district finances, and specifically what happens to our reserve level under different scenarios. As most of you already know, the District by law is required to keep a 3% reserve (measured as a % of expenses). The recent letter [...]
Two interesting updates were juxtaposed today. The first was summarized in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how a group of students, school districts, the California PTA, CSBA (California School Board Association) and ACSA (Association for California School Administrators) have filed a lawsuit arguing that elected officials in California have failed in [...]
Two months ago I wrote about the preliminary layoff notices that had to be given to certificated teachers by the March 15th deadline. The next deadline in this process is May 15th, where effectively “final” termination notices are given to these certificated employees. Although the District could always hire employees back, as a [...]
The following letter was sent out jointly from the Superintendent, School Board, and San Carlos Teachers Association today regarding the March 15th day for potential termination notices to teachers. The letter pretty much says it all.
To the San Carlos Community,
We are writing to inform you about a difficult step the San Carlos School District [...]
For the last few months, I’ve been contemplating putting together a video to explain how education finance works in California. It is an incredibly complex topic, and requires a bit of history and context setting. Doing this was partly inspired by a series of presentations done by SCEF, talks by Joe Simitian on [...]
In what can hardly be described as shocking, California was not selected as one of the finalists in the Federal Race To The Top (RTTT) program. 41 states applied to be eligible for this program, which could include awards of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. However, most education leaders in this state [...]