Seth Rosenblatt’s Blog

Last night the School Board met to discuss the possibility of placing a new Parcel Tax measure on the ballot in November. See the article in the San Mateo Daily News that discusses the meeting. The new ballot measure would effectively replace the existing parcel tax (Measure D), increase the per parcel amount by $75, and have a perpetual term.

This is an absolutely crucial measure that will allow us to both preserve programs in the light of extremely uncertain (and variable) state funding as well as expand new programs, better attract and retain teachers, and march toward that “inspired” education for all of our children.

Although there are some pros and cons to putting the measure on this November’s election, the Board felt that, on balance, the November election would provide a favorable environment giving the expected historical turnout. There was a small dispute on the language of the ballot measure, which will need to be resolved by the next meeting on August 4th. At this meeting we will take the official action item to place the measure on the ballot.

When the School Board votes to put a measure on the ballot, then an independent campaign committee will take over, with volunteers to help fund raise and campaign. You’ll soon hear more from me about that.

Although it came with little fanfare, the School District and the San Carlos Teachers Union did settle the contract for teachers’ salaries for both this past year and the year coming up. See the Supertendent’s letter announcing the settlement.

As I have mentioned before, I was confident that we would work out a fair deal, and as a new board member I was suprised by the adversarial nature of the process. It seems so anachronistic to have a 20th century blue collar union bargaining process for a series of professionals working for a non-profit organization. This is hardly the auto industry.

Some of my colleagues have mentioned — and Steve Mitrovich mentions it in his letter as well — that we need to improve the negotiating process. Not withstanding the fact that many other school districts do it the same way, the current process creates an unnecessary wedge between groups who truly have the same goal in mind — attracting, motivating, and retaining excellent teachers and providing the best education for our children. (Unlike the private center, where there is assumption that any cost savings line the pockets of management or shareholders, no such dynamic exists in our case. All money gets spent for the children — it is merely a matter of balacing the mix of what that money gets spent on.)

Unfortunately the macroeconomic environment is not going to get any better in the near term — State financing is not expected to improve anytime soon (and we are limited on enrollment growth — see my earlier post), so hard choices may lie ahead. Also, it is imperative that we pass an extension/increase in our Parcel Tax. See the following article about the Board’s effort regarding a new parcel tax (my family was on vacation at the time, but I fully support the effort and would have voted with the other 4 board members). I encourage you all to get involved in this effort!

If it were only that simple. As we’re close to the end of the school year (and the school’s fiscal year at the end of June), the San Carlos Educational Foundation has been furiously fundraising to reach its goal of $1 million dollars raised for our schools — a truly amazing feat. They are over $900,000 now, and they have a “challenge grant” which would net them an additional $25,000 if enough new donors participate. Please see their site and donate if you can!

On a personal note, I will be on vacation for the last two weeks of June, so you probably won’t hear from until early July. Have a great summer!

One of the principles of the airline industry’s business model is “yield management” — maximizing the likelihood that any given airplane would be full with passengers. As much of the cost in flying an airplane is fixed, any empty seat causes almost 100% of that lost revenue to flow to the bottom line.

There is an analogy here to school finance. In the Board Meeting last night, we discussed why, that over the last decade or so, San Carlos has actually been able to increase salaries at a greater percentage than our revenue per student funding increase (the “COLA”) for the State. Because San Carlos is largely a Charter school district, we have flexibility that other school districts do not — we can more easily accept “out of district” students roughly at our whim in any given year. This has the effect of allowing us to more proactively “manage” our enrollment number from year to year. So, if you look at the enrollment in the District, you’ll see a steady growth — much of this was from out of district “charter” students. We then received additional revenue because of the additional students, but even more importantly, we were doing better yield management. A simple example: if we knew there would be 15 more students from San Carlos entering any particular grade in a particular school, we could then let in exactly 5 more from out of the District, and then hire one additional teacher — effectively the classroom, like the airplane, would be full.

Although this has given us much flexibility in the past, unfortunately those days are coming to an end. Why? Simply stated, we are running out of physical capacity in our school campuses. So, barring construction of new facilities (or a dramatic increase in the use of portable classrooms, which would not be a very popular notion), enrollment growth will be modest or flat for the forseeable future. We won’t be able to manage that growth if we’re bumping up into our true capacity. That translates into no more “efficiency gains” and less total revenue relative to our costs. We will of course get more information on this when we get our final demographic study, but no doubt we will have to take all of this into account in planning future budgets and our overall cost structure.

Today I sent an e-mail update to folks who had supported me throughout my campaign giving them my reflections on my first six months in office. Feel free to take a look and send me any comments.

Last Wednesday I was able to attend the ceremony/reception honoring the hundreds of tutors who volunteer for the San Carlos Healthy Cities tutoring program. Also, yesterday I had the opportunity to sit through the Arundel PTA awards reception where the PTA honored many of the parent volunteers who work so hard day in and day out at the schools. As a former Board member of the San Carlos Educational Foundation, I certainly appreciate the thousands of person-hours it takes by so many parents to keep the school running. It reminds me that despite how poorly education is funded in our state and in our country, we should be really grateful to the fabulous parents in the community (including my wife) who donate so much, both in time and money. The San Carlos schools would be a very different place without that. Thanks to you all!

Welcome to my blog. This is a bit of an experiment and a work in progress, but I hope to come back to you fairly frequently with updates on happenings within the school district and my observations and perspective on certain issues. Feel free to comment on any post or send me an e-mail to seth@rosenblatt.org.