Another LAUSD up north

Sacramento City Unified School District is teetering on insolvency. And now the Sacramento City Teachers Association has voted to authorize a strike, demanding salary increases to deal with the surging cost of living in California’s urban centers, the Bond Buyer reported. But it appears that this strike is more of an attention-getting move with a tone-deaf district.The district is under the threat of state takeover as it wrestles with a $35 million budget gap.

Whoops, how bad?

Sacramento City Unified School District is chipping away at expenses in a last-ditch effort to close its $35 million budget gap, but time is running out and a state takeover seems imminent.The unprecedented rejection of the district’s budget in August by the Sacramento County Office of Education appeared to take many by surprise – but Sacramento City’s fiscal problems didn’t happen overnight.Auditors have noted that sharp turn toward insolvency came on the heels of the 2017 labor contract between the district and teachers, which narrowly averted a strike. They said that deal combined with other factors, including a decade of financial missteps, leadership problems, labor strife and shrinking student enrollment, to take the district to the brink of disaster. 

This school district will be doing the belly up during the contraction.

Facing a $36 million deficit and a possible state takeover, the top budget officer at the Sacramento City Unified School District has a sober message for his counterparts around California.
Sacramento is “just one of the first dominoes,” said John Quinto, the district’s chief business officer.
By any measure, Sacramento City’s distress is worse than the vast majority of California school districts.
But Quinto’s warning hints at looming problems for many more: The costs of pensions, health care and special education outpace new revenue they’re receiving from the state and they put some schools on a trajectory for red ink.

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The special needs students are mostly from the drugged neighborhoods and the schools run a war time triage center for the kids, having little to do with education.  Most of the excess administrators are about managing the school in a war zone, having nothing to do with education.  Like hospitals out here in which the emergency room has become a catchall for homeless folks on the street.

But the mayor of LA says it is not a problem, they have plenty of money for all the homeless, so we send them to LA.