Superintendent discusses budget reduction recommendations presented to school board
Superintendent Jennifer Loftus.
– On Jan. 28, 2025, at the regularly scheduled Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting, staff reviewed recommendations for upcoming staffing plans. As I shared in a previous article, the district has a structural deficit of approximately $4.9 million and, as a result, is faced with significant staff reductions in the upcoming school year.
In order to help mitigate the structural deficit, the Board of Trustees previously approved a retirement incentive plan (PARS) to allow an avenue for staffing reductions through attrition as opposed to simply a reduction in force strategy. This means that rather than letting go of recently hired staff, the district wanted to support anyone who was within a year or so of retirement to consider this year rather than next year or the year after.
This strategy allows the district to be hard on the issue but soft on the people who work in our system. The supplemental retirement program ultimately results in savings to the district if the district does not hire the same number of positions as it sees in retirements.
It goes without saying that we must reduce the number of staff we employ to make the kind of reductions we need. Based on PRJUSD enrollment trends, we also know that the district needs to right-size its staffing. Below, you will find a chart showing district enrollment between 2017-18 and the current year, as well as the district’s staff numbers over the same period of time.
This chart shows that the district has experienced an enrollment decline of 8.5% (enrollment 6,871 to 6,284, or 587 students) over the last eight years, whereas we have increased staff by 11.4%. (776.86 to 865.66, or 88.8 FTE).
Certificated (Cert) staff include teachers, counselors, special education teachers, and others.
Classified (Class) staff include paraprofessionals/aides, office staff, custodial/maintenance staff, and others.
Management (Mgmt) includes principals, assistant principals, Student Engagement Specialists, department managers, coordinators, mental health therapists, psychologists, classified management (food services, grounds, maintenance) directors, assistant superintendents, and the superintendent.
In order to determine what reductions would be made, information was gathered from a variety of sources, including input surveys provided to staff, parents, and students in grades 7-12. An email address was created to allow individuals to provide input as well as to seek answers to individual questions: budgetreductions@pasoschools.org
Staff also examined student outcomes and program impact. Finally, as the superintendent, I made myself available to staff to simply listen to additional input. All of this feedback and data was reviewed over a period of several months. If you are interested in any of this information, you can find it on the Budget Reductions page of our website linked HERE.
The staffing reduction recommendations shared with the Board at the January 28, 2025, Board of Trustees’ meeting include a reduction in staff as outlined below:
- Classified Net Reductions:
(22.6 FTE of 406.75 FTE) = 5.55%
Savings of $1,700,000 - Certificated Net Reductions:
(18.5 FTE of 381.25 FTE) = 4.85%
Savings of $2,400,000 - Management Net Reductions:
(6 FTE of 84.9 FTE) = 7.06%
Savings of $772,000
As detailed above, staffing reduction recommendations are being made fairly across all employee groups, with the management group taking the highest percentage of reductions even though this employee group did not see the same increase in staffing over the last handful of years.
The recommendation to reduce just over 47 staff members will reduce the structural deficit to approximately $2.2 million for the 2025-26 school year, down from $4.9 million. However, we will need to continue reducing staffing over the next couple of years. Fortunately, the district has a reserve fund balance (savings account) that will allow us to make additional future reductions over a period of a couple of years.
While making slow reductions will be gentler on the system, it is important to note that we must maintain a fund balance reserve of at least 3% of our operating budget. Deficit spending in a modest amount over a couple of years will be okay so long as we do not attempt to do this long-term, driving us below that 3% threshold.
Finally, we also discussed the idea of classroom reduction in grades K-2. It may seem counterintuitive to have this discussion while we are simultaneously reducing the number of staff across the district.
You might remember from my last article that school funding in California can be tricky. There are different rules for different sources of funding. In PRJUSD, a large percentage of our students qualify for free or reduced lunches, are English language learners, or are foster youth.
Students who qualify for services under one of these three categories result in the district receiving supplemental concentration funds, and these are allocated based on parent and staff input through the LCAP (Local Control and Accountability Plan) process. These funds are to be used to provide additional support to these learners specifically.
One strategy to meet the needs of these learners is through reducing the number of students in a classroom to allow the teacher additional time to provide extra support as needed. Because we know that being able to read at grade level by third grade is one of the most critical thresholds for a learner’s academic future, an argument can be made that this is where we should concentrate our efforts.
While baseline funding will not support this investment, it is an allowable use of supplemental concentration (LCAP) funds. This would mean we need to let go of other supports that are on the LCAP! Currently, 90% of the LCAP budget is already dedicated to staffing.
So the question is, what would we be willing to let go of to make room for the additional cost of classroom reduction? This is a challenge for the LCAP Advisory team to explore over the next few months.
We can do a lot of things, but we cannot do everything. As our budget continues to tighten, we will need to lean into these hard conversations together.
Do you have comments or concerns about the school district’s budget reduction process? Please feel free to contact us at budgetreductions@pasoschools.org.
-Written and submitted by Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Jennifer Loftus
