Calaveras USD Financial Update
2024-2025 School Year
9/10/24

Some Good News, Much Work Still Ahead

This communication is my first as your interim superintendent for the 2024-2025 school year. To get a clear and comprehensive understanding of our current financial situation has taken some time. Despite over 20 years of experience as a school district superintendent in similar sized school districts, making amendments and direction changes from a budgetary standpoint has been challenging.
With that said, I am happy to report that at the September 10th Board Meeting, our CBO and I presented an “approvable budget” for the Calaveras USD Board of Education to consider. In simple terms, the budget plan for this school year is conservative and in fact starts the process to create the required 3% reserve account for three-year financial projection. As you might remember, the district has not been able to maintain a 3% reserve for the past two fiscal years.
The Calaveras County Office of Education should be able to “approve” this budget with what is called a qualified certification. A qualified certification is assigned when the district may not meet its financial obligations for the current or two subsequent fiscal years. Maintaining a 3% reserve is an important step towards fiscal solvency. This is also an important moment in the process of realizing a prudent spending plan for our district.
However, we are far from “out of the woods” as over half of the reserve fund is defined as “one-time monies” and is not reflective of a consistent revenue stream. In other words, once that is spent….. its gone! These “one-time monies” will only be earmarked for one-time costs (for example, purchase of equipment, renovation/repair of buildings/classrooms, etc.)……..not on-going expenses!
As we move forward, we will continue to look for ways to improve our budget situation, realize savings and avoid unnecessary costs. The District staffed school sites at a 1:30 student to teacher ratio at all schools K-12 and 1:24 for TK (Transitional Kindergarten) for this year. This is not the staffing level we want to continue with for any significant period of time.
The best place for school districts to increase revenue (and increase student learning) is to focus on student attendance and enrollment. Compared to this time last year, our District is down six students (currently 2,851). However, student attendance is up from 93.1 % to 93.6 %. I have asked each school site to continue to work with parents and students to improve student attendance at each school site. Positive attendance (as in student actual attendance rate at school) averages around 93.5% which is consistent with historical averages.
We are hopeful for improvements in this area during the course of the school year. We are looking at many cost saving items including: review of all supplemental time sheets, purchase orders, contracts with vendors over $2,000.00, new job postings, each site budget is “scrubbed” for accuracy, mileage reimbursements, and looking at savings in health/welfare benefits, workers compensation.
As we move into budget planning for next year, more streamlining will be necessary to get us over the financial “finish line”. We look forward to working with staff and the community in this endeavor.