School districts face a perfect storm of declining enrollment and disappearing funding.

Celia Jiménez here, thinking about how school districts are restructuring after exhausting one-time funding while navigating the declining enrollment many of them are experiencing. 

In this week’s cover story in the Weekly, I covered how these and other factors are impacting services schools provide to TK-12 students in Monterey County and the approaches they are taking to keep their budget healthy or manageable in the near future. 

“Part of the layoffs you are currently hearing about are due to the need to right-size the budgets because of post-Covid era funding going away,” Monterey County Superintendent of Schools Deneen Guss says. 

TK-12 education funding is complex. It’s a mix of property taxes and state and federal funding, but according to many school district officials, it isn’t enough to provide all that's needed—such as special education services and infrastructure improvements. 

“The state gives us enough money to run schools, it does not give us enough money to revamp schools to do all the facilities which we need,” says Matt Turkie, the superintendent at North Monterey County Unified School District. 

Under Gov. Jerry Brown, the state initiated the Local Control and Accountability Plan and Local Control Funding Formula with the goal to make funding more equitable and add flexibility to how school districts spend their money. 

Monterey Peninsula Unified School District Superintendent PK Diffenbaugh says that under Gov. Gavin Newsom, this flexibility is fading away. 

“Giving school districts flexibility to spend funds based on their local context and priorities is the best way to go, because we're closest to the work, we're closest to the community and understand our community's needs,” Diffenbaugh says. 

One of the difficulties with having funding for specific programs is that oftentimes, once the funding expires, districts don’t have a way to sustain them.

“I'd rather receive less money, but have it be assured that it will keep going, then receive more money and have it stop in three to five years,” Diffenbaugh adds.

Some experts say the way schools are funded should change while others aren’t sure if that’s the best approach. 

What are your thoughts on how schools are funded? Should California keep or ditch its current system?