Sorry about that. We'll try that again. Good evening. I'd like to welcome everyone to the November meeting, and tonight we'll be discussing the budget scenarios. Mister, Raikstark, can we have roll call to establish quorum, please? Yes, miss madam president. On the roll call to establish quorum, student director Simmons? Here. Student director Smith? Here. Director Latta? Present. Director Williams? Present, sir. Director Hutchinson? Director Berry? Director Thompson? Present. Vice president Bachelor? Here. And president Brohard? Here. Quorum present.
Thank you. And may we have an interpretation check? Mister Hollis. Yes, Madam President. For tonight's meeting, we have three languages available for live interpretation. They are Cantonese, Arabic, and Spanish. We also have a translation closed caption feature available on Zoom that you can use by clicking the closed caption feature on your Zoom Taskbar. With that, we will move to announcements for Live Interpretation. We will start with Cantonese. I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only raise your hand if you need the language being announced, which at this time is Cantonese.
And I will ask Ms. Ho if she can come off mute and get the interpretation announcement for Cantonese. Hello, miss Ho? Mister Yuen, can you hear me? Miss Ho, can you hear me? Yes. I can now. Okay. Can you make the interpretation announcement for Cantonese, please? Sure. The Cantonese announcement is is done. Thank you, miss Ho. Checking the attendees to see if there's any hands raised with Cantonese interpretation. Seeing no hands, we will not start with Cantonese interpretation at this time. Moving forward to Arabic. I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only please only raise your hand if you need the language being announced,
which at this time is Arabic. And I will ask miss Abdi if she can come off mute and give the interpretation announcement for Arabic or mister Turek. Thank you, mister Turek. Checking the attendees to see if there's any hands raised for Arabic interpretation. Seeing no hands raised, we will not start with Arabic interpretation at this time. Moving forward to Spanish. I will lower all attendees' hands on Zoom. Please only raise your hand if you need the language being announced, which at this time is Spanish. And I will ask miss Walker Marquez if she can come off mute and give
us the interpretation announcement for Spanish. Spanish mute original audio Spanish announcement is done. Thank you. Thank you, miss Walker Marquez. Seeing that there is hands raised for Spanish, we will have Spanish interpreting, turned on, immediately after this announcement. So with that, that concludes our interpretation announcement, this first interpretation announcement. We may make, further announcements later in this meeting, and I pass it back to you, madam Thank you. Tonight's, meeting, we we have one major modification, which is that our closed session will be held after the open session so that
we can, hear from the community first and then we'll move into closed session and come back and report after that. Are there any other modifications to the agenda? Director Banchard? I'd like to make a short statement, if possible. So as the community may be aware of, there was ice activity in West Oakland today near Hooper Elementary and Harriet Tubman ECE. I want to thank the school site staff, for following protocols and keeping our students safe. I'd also like to thank the community for stepping up by supporting with foot patrols and solidarity pickets at pickup to keep our students and families safe.
Many of you all in attendance here today were at those pickets. Today we showed that when we band together, we can keep our students and families safe from masked men with white, unmarked bands. We must keep up our vigilance and call the Rapid Response hotline at (510) 241-4011. Do not hesitate to make a call. Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't speak about the incident involving a gun at Skyline last week and the actions that students, families, and staff are taking to combat the rise in gun violence in our community. Keeping our students safe requires trusted adults on campus educators,
mentors, counselors, community partners who know them, who notice when something is wrong, and can intervene early. Yet years of enrollment loss have forced painful consolidations and staffing reductions, leaving fewer adults to build those relationships and fewer resources for students to access before a crisis occurs. Schools cannot shoulder this responsibility alone. Gun violence is a public health issue and the city is a critical partner to ensuring our schools have the violence prevention infrastructure our students deserve.
So So today I'm calling for our community to join me in asking the Mayor and the City Council to invest in proven violence prevention resources, including mental health supports, youth engagement programs, safe passages strategies, and community based intervention teams. Comunidad de a sabe? Ubbo un actividad de ICE in West Oakland, circa de la Escuela's Hoover Thank you so much. Thank you. The first item on the agenda today and the only item is, H125-2531E, budget scenarios fiscal year twenty twenty five-twenty twenty six and twenty twenty six-twenty twenty seven.
The presentation from the staff, a thirty minute presentation from the staff. Right now, I need a motion. Yeah. There's no motion. Oh, I'm sorry. Missus Grant Dawson, do you have a do you have a presentation? Good evening. Board of Directors, members of the audience, members of the audience who are listening at home. This evening, we're going to be discussing a resolution that was advanced by our Board of Directors. Our staff has worked diligently to make some very specific proposals, that we want to work with our community and work with the Board in advancing.
I really want to make a personal comment about where we are today, and what it means for our community. I thank all of you for participating in this process by being here this evening. And, some of you have heard me say this before, but what we know for our community, what is certain, is some of the challenges and decisions we make may hurt. There's no way to cut $100,000,000 roughly 20% of our unrestricted general fund without significant pain. But I care about all of us.
I care about our community. I care about our programs. I care about all that we love about being in school and making a difference for our students. But I want you to hear me when I say this. I see you. I see our teachers who show up every day pouring everything into our classrooms, wondering if their position may not even exist next year. I see our cafeteria workers, our custodians, buildings and grounds staff, paraprofessionals, and office staff, every person who makes our schools run. They are all important to our overall goal and mission.
You are essential. I see our families who are already stretched thin, worried about what these cuts may mean for our children's education. I see our students who deserve stability and excellence, not another round of decisions that may disrupt their learning. Now, what I want to talk about is what is different. I've worked in the schools for over forty five years, these schools. I've lived through budget crises before. I've seen us find creative solutions, increase fundraising, philanthropic support, and during the pandemic,
federal relief dollars that gave us breathing room for several years. Now, those one time funds are gone. And this time, our financial situation is genuinely urgent. We will fall back into State receivership, likely within two years, if we don't make some changes. If we lose local control, state, state, this state will make decisions for us and our community voice disappears, which is something very important. I've been your superintendent for only four months and in that time I've chosen to
be completely honest with you and even when the truth is uncomfortable. So let me be clear, This is not a drill. Our budget deficit is real. And if we don't address it now, the consequences will be far worse than difficult choices we're facing today. If we lose local control, we'll lose the ability to protect what we believe in and what's important to us. It'll only be about spreadsheets. It won't be about our children. Now, I'm the most optimistic person that you can find. I believe there's a path forward.
But there's a path forward with all of us working together. And that means our Board, our community, and staff. I'm very, very committed and we'll be making some proposals today, but it'll be based on something that I really want us to adopt and I talk about it a lot, is a care centered framework as we develop these recommendations together. This means centering the needs of students and families first, caring for the teachers and staff who support them, and doing our very best to minimize the pain in these difficult times.
Every decision will be filtered through that lens. How do we protect what matters most while meeting our fiscal obligations? I've been meeting principals, teachers, union leadership, and parents over the past few weeks. And while no one wants cuts, there's growing recognition that we must act now to preserve what's important to us. We can't help our students, our families if we do not have basic programs and support in place. So tonight,
my staff will present two budget balancing options and I want everybody to take a close look at where we are, but there's more work to do. And it's more work that we're going to have to do together. It's not going to happen with people pointing fingers. This is a long term situation. But one thing I know as an Oaklander, born and raised here, that we're resilient, we're committed, we believe in the work that we do, and I know, and that's one thing about longevity, I know we can get through this. But we need to come together and listen to each other in a positive manner,
in an open manner to be flexible, bold and committed. I'm asking you to listen closely as we have as you hear some of the recommendations. There's much more work to do. There's much there are many challenges ahead of us. But again, Oakland is a survivor. We're a progressive people. We're a committed people. We're resilient. I can't say that enough. So tonight, I'm sitting with the Board. I'm sitting with all of you willing to take this walk. A walk that is very important to me.
I know what an education can do and I know some people have been challenged and even feeling trust about what's real and what's not real. But I believe it is real and I wouldn't say this if I didn't believe it. I wouldn't even be here if I didn't believe in this district and this community. So, I am committed to working side by side with all of you. Our staff has been working day and night to think of all kinds of ways that we can make a difference. I want you to listen in a respectful manner as we bring these recommendations or
proposals forth and know that it's not enough. But we have to be able to think about what more can we do to accomplish our goal. So, as we begin the process this evening, I want you to hold I want you to hold the power of people working together. You heard our Vice President talk today about just how people came together as a community to support, a situation while we were trying to do other work and teach and be children
and do all these things. But it's amazing, in a moment, everybody came together in service of our students and families. And that's something I've seen, I know can happen, and I know creativity can come from the needs that are out there. So I ask everybody to do your best thinking, to be respectful, to be positive, and we will get through this. But we can only do it in partnership. I also want to say one last thing. When we do get through this, and I see some people in the audience who've taken this walk with me,
we will be a better district because we will have new systems, we'll be stronger, we will have seen it before and we will be able to stand together. This is my hope. It is my prayer. It's what I think about day and night. One of the things that grounds me and usually every morning I go to a school, I've been at Skyline every day this week except for this morning, I see students. I see families. And that gives me energy to do whatever I can, collectively with all of you, to take this walk,
to figure out how we can address our deficit and make our district the best district it can possibly be. And I know we can do that. So to that end, I want us to, come together as we listen to these proposals. Our staff will be making individual presentations from these particular areas. And I want you to think about your ideas of what we might do. I'm open to you sharing them. You can email me, share your ideas. We have a very short timeline,
but it's doable because it's important. It's important to support our students and families. Thank you, President Rutherford. Thank you. Fantastic. Alright. I'll walk us through, and hi, everyone. If you since I'm relatively new to the district, I'm Dan Bellino. I'm our chief of staff. I'll walk us through some of the introductory slides before handing it over to our chief business officer, Lisa Grant Dawson. So you can see the overview here. One of the things, so this was we did our best to post as early as possible, so that folks could have the weekend to review things. So the initial slides were posted on Friday,
November 14. At the bottom of this overview slide, you can see the things that were updated as of this morning, so that you didn't have to kinda search through things. So, what is what we wanna make sure is clear is that, this is just the the starting point, and that that starting point that we initiated was around, the central office management. So that's a bulk of tonight's presentation. But we know there's a lot more in the resolution that was passed on October 8, that we haven't yet been able to incorporate into the scenarios.
So I just want to recognize that, you know, while it while tonight's presentation is heavy on the central management piece, we understand there's a lot more there and that's laid out at the end of the next next step slides. So just jumping to the conclusion, but then we'll walk through how we got to this point. You can see here a summary of each of the divisions and the unrestricted restricted savings, total FTE and then a percent of the reduction. And when we get to Slide 10, you'll see what that percent is based off of the denominator.
So slide one I'm sorry, scenario one, scenario two, we'll talk about the difference between these two scenarios here in a second. Okay. So when you look at when staff reviewed the resolution, this October 8 resolution, you know, we'd spent a good bit of time just trying to break it down, and there's three kind of overarching goals to it that show up throughout it and and this was some of our focus, reducing management positions and restructuring the networks, streamlining and reducing consultants and outsourcing, and then identifying budget adjustments totaling $100,000,000
You can see at the bottom of this slide some of the analysis and things that we dug into. So a key component of the resolution directs staff to substantially restructure the central office and reduce administrative positions. So again, this is where tonight's presentation focuses a bit. This slide, so that graphic at the bottom there is if you pull out, and this is from current year budget, if you pull out just unrestricted non SNC let's see. It doesn't show up on the, TV screen.
But, that's for central offices. Alright. So on the left, you can see the resource is our unrestricted and this is and Lisa Grant Dawson will walk us through some of this here in a bit, but the unrestricted, non supplemental, and concentration. Right? So that's our base, our base, general fund. And then on the right, you can see all the divisions that are tagged there, everything except for schools. Now some of those central offices on the right do include direct services to schools. One to highlight, right, operations,
that includes consortiums, so even they're captured in the central office budget, but it's a direct staff that directly work at schools. So, you know, when we look at this, we think, we are absolutely in a place where we have to do less with less. We can't continue to keep doing the same work with less. And this the staff of this district have done a remarkable job over the last ten years of continuing to maintain and sometimes increase as things have lessened.
Right? Cost increases. Cuts are being made at Central. And so now we're at a point of in order to really like we've talked about cutting to the bone, getting to the core. And so what we thought about was, okay. What do we need to do to maintain minimal compliance with statutory and contractual obligations? And quite honestly, those aren't these are these are not necessarily recommendations. Right? This is these are proposals in order to get this way, to get to the a balanced budget, but we know that these aren't necessarily things that any of us actually want,
but this is this is where we're at. And then as Superintendent Sadler discussed in her opening remarks, the care centered framework, which she really, you know, really, you know, authentically comes through in doctor Sadler and that is the the lens through which, a lot of the, discussion and decisions are being made and then, of course, right, trying to keep the schools open, all of our schools open and minimizing, keeping away any of the reductions from our schools, to be consistent with the resolution and the care centered framework.
One of the resolution, directives involve the Teaching and Learning Committee. Those are not incorporated in tonight's presentation. The Committee met last Thursday, Linked in the updated slides are the documents that were available for the Committee to review and so just want to, reference that that has not been incorporated yet. Alright. Hand it over to our CBO. We can't stand it. Okay. So good evening, president Brohard and to all of our, directors and all of the family friends and colleagues that are here tonight.
So one of the things we wanted to make sure that, we took some time to do is, there's, definitely a lot of interest and activity when it comes to, where's the district's money. And I read somewhere that the district and schools are gonna get more money. But what is really important in this component is clarifying this $100,000,000. That $100,000,000 in the history of this district has existed, for a long time. One, who knows how much the district borrowed from the state when the district went under
receivership in 2002? 100,000,000. Originally and revised total was 100,000,000. The 100,000,000 has appeared in various, communications over time as a deficit or close to that amount target. And so we're here twenty five years later to share that part of this and why we're here is because we really have not addressed the original, if you will, not the same dollar, not the same spin, but the principle about how, we arrived here. And so LCFF,
the Local Control Funding Formula, didn't exist in 2000. We had a different funding stream, which was lower. And so now we have the Local Control Funding Formula, which, this is sharing with you the components of how that funding formula works. So the first five columns, some are smaller than others, ultimately, encapsulate what we call the base. Though they have specific areas, it's LCFF base. Then you have grade span adjustment. So that's, resources that allow us to reduce our class sizes, for t k three and then ninth grade.
Then you we now have t k enrollment dollars. And as of the last budget, and you'll see at first interim, that amount goes up about 2,000,000. But it is, again, to continue the efforts to, increase the t k enrollment, and we've talked about that as well. And then there's an old, block grant called targeted instructional, block grant. That was one of the original restricted resources that was designed to help stu school districts to improve instruction. So when the revenue limit shifted and local control funding formula was created,
some of those areas to include the last one, home to school transportation, carried over into this new funding model. But that Targeted Instructional Material Block Grant, which we received $10,000,000 that's the same amount we received in 02/1112. We've recently started to see increases in home to school transportation. So although they're all still part of the local control funding formula, some of those amounts didn't move. Now the the LCFF base, grade span, and then the last two, columns, supplemental concentration, which we'll also talk about, Their purpose,
and the reason for that allocation is based on who we're serving, how many of those students that we're serving, and you'll hear a little bit more about that and what those resources are. And so they're all their although they're all part of the unrestricted general, fund, the base, the tallest column, and the smaller columns that follow it are what we really wanted to make sure that our community really understood when we're saying, well, where is the $100,000,000 problem? We've been sharing. It's in the base. So this is designed to help you to understand that by unpacking it section at
a time. So allowing us to take the resolution and unpack the resolution, we shared the three bullets as it relates to where we see from the board's resolution were the key areas. And one of those key areas is keep all of the schools open. So this this shows you using 2526 budget, If you take at the top right, the $362,000,001.51 $6.83, you go back, this column, this is where this comes from, these first four columns. So if you take that amount of money that we're currently projected to earn this
year, and then you just allocate what our school site dollars, we have in the green at the bottom, 148, 149,000,000 left. K. So for all of the, mass junkies or those who, love money, and and and and we all wish that this was, you know, our balance of our bank accounts. Right? That's a not just a small amount that we're absorbing from the base. It's nearly 60% of it. So this concept that we are not investing in sites and schools,
that's false. And and I've heard it. I've seen it. False. Untrue. Because, again, the base is what takes care of the district. It's also supposed to take care of other things in the district as well because it is our primary source of of income. This next slide adds transportation. So that was that fifth column that you saw on the blue bar chart. And why are we adding transportation here? Because transportation for each district is different. Some districts provide home to school transportation, and they provide transportation, for students, my preference,
and terminology with exceptional needs. More commonly, students that, are, have an IEP that designates that, hey. Have transportation services. Some districts only provide, services for, special education. In our district, we provide bus passes for our middle and high school students. So we don't have buses that take students our own OUSD buses, nor do we contract for that. But we do provide bus passes for HD transit. And then in addition to that, we provide, transportation services for those students that have been designated to receive it.
So out of the 18,000,000 that's in the whole department, we do get 6,000,000 from the local control funding formula. That doesn't cover all of it. So that's why it's on this slide that says transportation and contributions because the base general fund is the house. It is responsible for taking care of all funds, especially if those funds are unable to meet their obligations. So with that, this is just shows you and just unpacks, out of the total amount for transportation. And so, one of the things that, carried underneath the 18,000,000,
that is not a greater than sign. That's like a bullet, that goes under the 18,000,000. So it's really just showing you that out of the 18,000,000, 17.5 is transportation. Our transportation department also has responsibilities for warehouse and mail and other activity. So that's where the difference comes from. So from the 17,000,000, if we get 6,000,000 in revenue, that means that the base general fund contributes 11,700,000.0 to make that program whole. K? The next, areas are special education contribution,
and then we have a requirement of ongoing major maintenance. That's a mathematical formula. It's based on 3% of our total expenditures, unrestricted and restricted. K? That also happens to be the same 3% calculation, for the district's reserve. The other thing that comes into this area that, we've applied so, again, you know, fund accounting and all the ins and outs, can get a bit complicated. But when we have money that comes in, to help offset, cost, And there's another area that I'll show you of resources that come in based on
the services that the general fund provides. We put in the adopted budget some onetime contributions. Three of them come from our three parcel taxes, and then we receive the onetime allocation of reimbursements, for Medicare expenses that we, paid for out of the general fund starting back in twenty fifteen, sixteen. So that means that we were doing work and providing services, but last some of our funding happens, we get reimbursed from it for it. In this case, it was ten years later that we started getting reimbursed for these resources.
And so you see that as a negative because it's offsetting contributions that are going out expenses. Okay? So that's why it's a negative. So after we spend that, from the 148,000,000 that we earned from the prior page, adding transportation, we have 13,900,000.0 left. K? So, essentially, by the time we take care of these two areas, which again are very student facing, they're supposed to be student facing because we're a school district. We have 13, almost 14,000,000 left. So what's missing? What's missing is you do have,
you know, what is very much, codified as central, allocations, in different districts. It's called, you know, downtown and other, terms. But it's what's your central allocation is? So if it's not at a school site, and the way we make the designation is the site number. If it's not at a school site, or a direct, student service site, then it's central. But central includes all of the components that help the district run. If there's direct services, and we've added since this first slide was presented,
what types of positions are in those particular areas and, therefore, what kind of services. So, with your central staffing nonmanagement, you have custodial services, nurses, teacher replacement positions. All those positions are in a central site, meaning they're managed and are supporting of school sites from a central site. They're not allocated at a school site directly. You also have the management, position which includes, some of the chiefs, not all, directors, program managers, etcetera. So many of those same, titles and terms are funded by other resources,
but this is what's actually sitting, in this particular area. We commonly do not also show management and nonmanagement, but the resolution speaks very distinctly to make yet another segregation. Site central, management, not management. And so this is us wanting to make sure that it was clear and responsive to the board about what those, tenants are. Books and supplies also is another, area because centrally, we do, provide and there's other resources that support textbook and other areas, but that also is office materials and other supplies,
that are needed throughout the district. Lastly, in the other services and operating, which, is there's object code numbers that go with this. So this is also is an area that has been talked about a lot. What's in your 5,000 object code? You're spending a lot of money on consultants. I specifically added the amount in the base that is spent on consultants because it really is not what it's thought to be, that there's $30,000,000 in consultants. It is the central office and the base that pays for utilities, pays for telephone,
it pays for all of the things that make all of our schools run. We don't send and ask for all of these utility companies, though they bill us by site for each individual school site to pay for those things. Lastly, that red negative number. So when we have support services that we're providing to restricted resources so, for instance, there are some restricted resources that can factor in indirect cost. That indirect cost means in order for you to execute this particular program under this
resource, you have to have some type of general administrative fee. That helps offset costs for, payroll, for custodial, for any other support that this particular these particular resources can't pay for. Most of our resources, you cannot pay for restricted resources administrative costs. There's a lot that you can't pay for an administrator. So those administrators or those that manage the program are in the base, and then, therefore, the expenses are happening in those restricted resources. So one of the things that, was also shared when we get to that remaining amount of negative 82,000,000,
because that means that we don't have enough money in the base to pay for all these services. That's where the issue is. We start here. We end with a 150,000,000 coming around. And then we go here. We end with $1,314,000,000. We don't have enough, and this is where the issue is that we need to make adjustments to to reduce the $100,000,000 I'm gonna go to a footnote in a second. Another thing that we wanna make sure that it's clear, when you're looking at the FTEs, these are just the FTEs that are in this particular resource, the base.
It would be improper to make a correlation that there's a ratio of one to three management to non management because these positions, as well as some of the non management, have other resources as well as those that help support it and lead it with other resources. So this is just telling you which positions are funded out of the base. Not the work they do and how expensive it is. K? Alright. So we wanted to add a little tag about the 83,000,000
with thanks to some of the questions that we received, initially. So, you know, what's the problem and and and why is there, a negative 82,000,000? So, again, we only shared with you one resource out of the 170 resources that we have in the district. And it's the biggest one, but we're only showing you that slice because it's the primary, area, and it's the area that supports the district. So the district's 3% reserve is a $26,000,000 commitment. And so part of the activity when the resolution was passed was,
well, we have to be able to earn back the reserve that we lost. When we adopted the budget, we only had a 2.9 reserve. After we closed the year, the beginning balance was lower. And then as we saw additional expenses coming in, we began to see there were three iterations of this, the adopted budget, the forty five day revise. And just recently, we did an update to the board, which has, like, a preliminary first interim view. Again, everything's still moving and changing and shifting, but, again, we're continuing to to update, the board,
accordingly. So when we're looking at what we this 82,600,000.0, we're saying that the base structural deficit, right, about 17,600,000.0, in order to, restore the reserve, that's the work that we would have to do in addition to restoring the 82,000,000 for 2526. Well, how does that affect 2627? Because the target was a 100,000,000 for 2627, and that's because we had a beginning balance. And so I'm gonna go to the, oops, next slide or go to this slide.
We're starting the year with a $55,000,000 beginning balance. That $55,000,000 beginning balance helps to cover the 82,000,000. But as we shared previously, the money is not coming from the right places. It's coming from other unrestricted resources that should not be covering the base. So that's where the challenge is. And and why this is important for us to continue to look at this and to share, you know, how we're continuing to try to work through this is because we need to be able to address this where we're hemorrhaging,
and that is in the base. And so as you're going through this and, again, as you're helping to, develop strategies and and communicate with us about that and as the board, continues to direct, we wanted to make sure that that was clear. Lastly, just wanted to share that at the board meeting last week, we talked about, an adjustment to measure n and h, for some reserves that were part of the original, adopted budget. So that 25,000,000 does not include the 7,000,000 from, measure n and h that will be added back. But, ultimately, it's just gonna make the fund balance 8,400,000.0.
All of those resources are one time as far as the use of it. They don't carry forward. So that's why, again, we're still marching forward to try to figure out how to balance, this budget with, the, parameters that we've been provided. Lastly, wanted to provide the supplemental concentration budget. So the supplemental concentration, we count it as, we count it as three different resources, and that's because there's a site allocation for supplemental, a central allocation for supplemental to provide support to school site as well as concentration. And so this follows the same methodology of how much we earn,
which is a 120,000,000, and then where you see the allocations for supplemental and concentration and staffing. Again, with the interest that, is the tone of the resolution, the majority of the resources are nonmanagement positions. And then you still do have, of course, positions that not only that are coded in this resource, but also in the base that support the efforts and the the work, in these particular areas. So you have the central management, nonmanagement of supplemental and site based,
management, and nonmanagement. And then you also have central, books and supplies, and you also have other services and operating expenses with in this case, supplemental concentration is not paying utility cost. So you do have a variety of different, activities to to include, consultant and other activities that fall in the 5 thousands that, are funded by that. But, again, it's 11,300,000.0. These particular resources can only be used for the parameters, under which supplemental concentration is to support, and it is to support our addition our English language learners,
our foster youth, as well as those students that are economically disadvantaged. And so you see that we not only have, revenue, but we budget to spend all of those resources. And so with that being said, theirs is why this is not considered a way forward to offset what ultimately is an issue with the base. And so now we'll move into the draft scenarios. And so we'll start with the superintendent's, department, and then we'll move into all of the other departments, that will be presented tonight. Alright. Before I walk through the scenarios for the superintendent's office and a summary,
I said I was gonna do something back here on slide, whatever slide number it is, six and seven, but I forgot to do it when I got to slide 10. So I've I had mentioned that on the right the right column, the denominator comes from slide 10. So let's take in the superintendent's office and communications department and see a 51% reduction is, scenario 31% reduction is scenario two. So that denominator comes from, that drop down list on the right. If you combine communications and superintendent down at the bottom,
3,400,000.0 plus 1,300,000.0 equals 4,700,000.0. So that is, where you take total savings, and then, then you got your denominator there to get to the percent. So just wanna go back to that. Can you just go a little bit slower on that piece? We were all kind of because we're a little in here. Thank you for slowing me down. Okay. So right. So here, the 51% reduction, say, in the superintendent communications, you've got the, savings, which is your numerator. And then in slide 10, which is referenced at the the header of that column,
the denominator would come from 3,400,000. Do you see down at the bottom where it says communications, 3,400,000? That's the total unrestricted non SNC, and then the same thing for the superintendent's office. I'm good. Yeah. And we can I mean, we can definitely take time to walk through it more? Okay. So scenario one for each division, as we walk through it here, is the attempts to cut as far to the core as possible. Right? So we talked about doing, needing to do less. Right? And this scenario one would be doing less with the very least,
and so, this would there would need to be there will be changes in the way work is done. Things will be more restricted or and less flexibility, for school sites, more centralized decisions, all because there would not be the amount of staff available to provide all the additional, flexibility, autonomy, things that come in. And so, that's scenario one. Scenario two basically takes scenario one and builds back a tiny bit from it. Right? Still trying to stay as minimal as possible but,
in ways that would not as significantly impact the work. So in the superintendent's office, I'm gonna start at the bottom here, what you have in the superintendent's office is you have the superintendent, an executive assistant, you have the chief of staff, you have a chief partnerships officer, you have a executive assistant, and you have a executive director of safety. If we were to reduce three of those FTE, the chief of staff, chief partnerships officer, and an executive assistant and the chief of staff office, These are the impacts that, the District would incur for the operations of the superintendent's office.
There are some things, and I'm going to go back up to the top, that we're still exploring. Are there some reductions in some of the contracts that we have in place around memberships? One of those contracts, it actually shows up in the communications budget, but it's all related, is some of our lobbying work and legislative advocacy work. You can see that, you know, that would need to be reduced and there are other avenues to still ensure our voice is heard in Sacramento and elsewhere and so the,
you know, to lean into the partnerships as with the agencies that you see referenced on the slide. The Chief of Staff Office has traditionally been a key central point or hub for a lot of the philanthropic work done and this district has done a remarkable job of bringing in philanthropic dollars. It's part of why the district can do so many things while still running such a significant structural deficit. You know, there would be reduced support for the leadership transitions over the next couple years,
reduced support even though the ED of safety would stay, there would be impacts of the overall support for that position and overall safety work and then a part of the proposal is a school security contract that it's a million dollar contract that, provides direct school security personnel. At our school sites, but it it has traditionally lived in the chief of staff office, in the chief of staff budget. So scenario two basically just builds back from that a a small amount. I won't go through the detail of it for the sake of time. And then in the communications department, we looked at how much we could reduce there.
There are a number of things we can do. We would need to trim down the amount of communication that that we put out. We'd have to narrow our focus. You can see the five items there that, are recommended as the areas of focus that are of most value to the district and to the community we serve. And there are, you know, impacts though on potential enrollments, school to family communications, with the loss of some staff there. And then another piece that's not yet finalized but in process is discussions around some
restructuring. What we're trying to look at is, across the district, how we can improve some of the efficiencies within communications both in the contracting. So this gets to some of the work of the outsourcing task force, and, you know, we can so those are all things that, you know, are are things that will actually, I think, improve the work, and and, lead to some savings. And then scenario two, would the difference between one and two for communications department is we keep that, the website developer because of the value to, the school sites,
and the value that school site support for Webb is is to enrollment and the school and family communications. Alright. I'll hand it over to our general counsel. Thank you, Dan. Good evening, board and community. I'll probably be the shortest, presentation considering, size. But I'm gonna walk through governance division. And the governance division is made up of the legal department, the labor relations, ombuds, charter school authorization, and the board office. So think compliance for all of those areas.
And in the current context, we're working really hard to, defend the district but also, to increase compliance. So we put together this to include in both scenarios, the elimination of two FTE, but we're shifting work from, to include more internal capacity to focus solely on special education. Now that we are a district of 20%, I believe population special special education, we're really seeing the need to lean in on compliance, and legal issues related to special education.
This will also and we're also in the process of evaluating all contracts initiated by legal and including, those in our scenarios. And so what we've put forward is a combination of, bringing in more internal capacity, as needed for all those compliance areas, labor, legal, and the board office to in order to maintain compliance and not increase legal exposure. And we will also, not be sharing here our legal exposure, not going into detail on into that.
But I'll pass it on now to Tara for Oakland. And, the first thing I would like to do is just talk to you about what we do in the talent division. The talent division is which you would think of as traditional HR work, And also, we have new teacher support, which is a different unit, and they support our new teachers through, through entering the district and clearing their credentials. And then we have, PAR, which is actually not part of Talent. It sits in our budget. PAR is independent, and it's a partnership between OEA and the district,
to support teachers as well. And I've listed here what our core services are. I won't go through them all, but you can see there that we do our best to support our employees and, ultimately, our students as well. I did not do two scenarios. I we just did one. And, you know, this is I also just wanna say, which we all know, but when we say FTE, that is people, and that's a person. And I've been here twenty years and I've watched, people who have worked really hard for this district tough to leave.
And, so I just don't want us to forget that as we're talking about FTE. But, with this scenario here, we have gone through, through cuts. And what we've done a lot in talent, we've tried to keep the FTE, but we've lowered, we don't have as many directors. We have more, staff that work in the office. And, so we've gotten to the point now where it's hard to figure out how to reduce, but with the fact that we will need to, what will happen is that it will impact our services.
So we can't, keep up with it's already a struggle, and some of you might be out there saying, you know that they don't always do what they're supposed to do. And and we work hard too, but, it'll it'll still be an impact. So it will be an impact on our, programs, our pipeline programs, residency work, some of our hiring, and also our recognition, because if we can't, you know, we're not gonna be able to have the same amount of, events that we have, we shouldn't be.
If it comes down to feeding somebody an event or keeping a person, then we need to keep a person. So that's generally how I would say our will be impacted. The other thing I just wanna note is oh, I think it's I have a slide for it. Excuse me. We are going through our contracts. I well, you you might thank you for for that. But I'm not answering you, but I hear you. So I would like to we we believe that the work that we do impacts kids. That's why we're doing it.
And so we are looking at our contracts. And as long as students, as long as staff are taken care of, that is an impact for our students, and we shouldn't forget that. So but, there is more contracts to look at. One of the things that we're gonna also look at is how we're advertising our jobs. Because some of the, contracts that we have there to advertise, You know, we've tried over the years to negotiate them down, so we'll just probably have to stop doing some of them and just, but we really wanna look at that more before just putting it up there.
But these are some of the areas that we would be, likely reducing in. And so we found about 600,000 that we can identify, but we'll continue to go through that. And then this is, not to suggest that schools should change any of their, substitute costs, but we do manage the subsystem. So one thing that we've seen is there are so we're talking about, GP or base dollars that are unrestricted. And so the areas where if you need a substitute for professional development or field
trips or observation, those can come out of different resources and and they've been, coming out of our general fund. So just to work with schools on how to make sure in our budget office we'll work together to reallocate. So it's not suggesting that they, reduce what they're doing. It's just how it's allocated. And you can see, over the years, at least, right now we're at $800,000 for this year so far that we could probably reallocate out of GP. And that's it for me. And I'll go into Preston. Thank you.
Sarah, are these the number is yours, Sarah? All good. Good evening, President Brohard, doctor Sadler, Preston Thomas, the chief systems and services officer for Oakland Unified School District. One of the things that I just wanted to say is that as the systems services, it's primarily over operations. And the operations team is mostly funded under the general fund. And so one of the pieces as a former teacher, I do always look at trying to maximize our efficiencies around these departments to be able to invest the most, in our schools and I do want to walk through.
You're gonna see some scenarios for those of you that you've heard me talk about some of these topics. You're gonna see some really deep cuts in some of the investments that are here. So the first why don't you oh, here we go. Ah, there we go. Can you forward it? It's frozen. There we go. We yeah. If you want more it works now? Oh, great. Okay. So the first department that I'm bringing forward, from the team is the tech services department, that serves all of our technology infrastructure. And one of the things I wanna just go over, if you look at this slide, it all of my slides are gonna be oriented with what we do,
what are the past reductions, and what are the things that we've been doing to be build those efficiencies, and on the right, what are some things that we plan on doing moving forward to get to the reductions that are necessary, and an overall summary at the bottom. So what I wanna do is I wanna talk a little bit about the tech services department because they do support the core infrastructure of the district including all of the things that are happening here tonight, the Zoom, the the infrastructure that you see here. There was an assessment done in 2020 that did a review of our departments and this goes to kind of the district having dealt with this over an extended period
of time and our school the school services report showed that our technology department was one of the smallest departments for similar sized districts across the state. So there isn't a lot of things that you can cut there without deeply impacting the infrastructure in the system. We did shift and you heard, miss Grant Dawson talk through, like, how you can use supplemental and concentration. There were some positions that we shifted in that area to be able to use some of the concentration supplemental and concentration funds, and we did eliminate a position to start moving forward with some restructuring to align
to the, to some of the new needs around cybersecurity, AI, things like that that are going to be coming for our district and are something that we do have to attend to. Here are some of the things that we found and the team has identified within the department to bring some pretty significant revenue back to the district. One of the things is that our district has incredibly outdated infrastructure. And if you look, I think there it was mentioned before, but there's a significant investment in AT and T and phone lines. Those are primarily for our elevators and for our fire alarm systems. And what we plan on doing and we've already started this initiating a shift in
elevators over to the network that will bring back about $1,750,000 to the general fund. And when you do update your infrastructure in some of these areas there is savings that can support the general fund. After we have done that, we will look into the following year, 2627, into some upgrades around the fire alarm systems that will bring that off. And that total of those two buckets right there, come up to a little over, dollars 2,500,000.0. One of the things is prior to the pandemic this district had deeply under invested
in technology that students had access to. You had four students working on every one computer and the only reason the district had invested in that was to ensure that you could do the state mandated testing, right? So our baseline is four to one. I want you to remember that in terms of device ratios. We have brought up back to today that we are now one on one one to one with students, but we have to now maintain that. To refresh the devices for students, it's about $3.43500000.0 dollars each year. And so what we're recommending is you shift some of the general fund to cut
into supplemental and concentration $2,300,000 to cover that ongoing commitment to devices. If the Board should choose to shift that, we're trying to keep it away from the classroom, we could actually go back to a lower rate ratio to even get more funding, in the general fund. The other thing that every year we have gone through a process around looking at our software budget and we've done this every single year over the last three years to try to reduce some of the areas where we have software, where it's either outdated and we no longer use it, or we shift that into some of the academic categories. And and Sandra does an amazing job paying for that in restricted funds.
So we believe that there's, an additional half million dollars there. So that's there is only one scenario for tech services because they so do so deeply cut touch and work with the school sites and support our infrastructure. The next one is custodial services and you'll see this in two shifts. One of the biggest shifts that happened in 2019 and you'll see this impacting another department, our buildings and grounds department, is in order to stave off some of the budget situations that were happening, we move the allowable percentage of custodians into the buildings and grounds team.
The Buildings and Grounds team is the team that does repair and maintain our facilities. That 20% led to eliminations of 12 FT feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet E in the Buildings and Grounds team and it now is about $4,600,000 worth of funds that is in your routine maintenance over the routine maintenance that our custodians do to maintain the sites. We align to the CASBO formula, so there's a direct formula that really talks about the number of classrooms you serve, the square footage you're covering, the cleanliness of the school, the cleanliness standards, and we'll talk about that in a second.
We eliminated a manager of custodial services in 2023 to get leaner, and we shifted some of the management as the expanded learning opportunities program came forward. That that increases the amount of our facilities that need to be used and there are facilities that historically haven't been used until 06:00 at night are now being used until 06:00. That puts a tremendous burden on our cleaning staff and so we did shift some of the funding into eLab. So what you'll see here are some descriptions of things that we can do moving
forward is you can shift the custodial, allowable amount of custodial expenses into eLock. And this really depends on the the management of the eLock program. The second thing, and this might be counterintuitive, but when we have vacancies and we have shortages we pay for people to keep classrooms clean out of overtime. One of the things that we can do is increase the attractiveness of the substitute pay rate so that we have subs across the board because across most of the operational divisions, we don't have enough substitutes to cover when people are out and we cover that through overtime. The second two are there's not a dollar amount there,
but at the will of the board in terms of what you want us to go back and look at, there are two ways that you can create additional eliminations in this area and savings for the district but they are painful and they are cutting to the bone. One is you can change your cleaning standard. We have moved to cleaning classrooms generally on a daily basis. You can move to every other day by increasing the square footage that custodians have to cover. That will reduce the number of FTE that you have allocated to school sites. After we go through the budgeting process this year and we've allocated out space to
school sites, some of our schools extend into spaces in which they they don't necessarily need by the utilization formula and we're we have to clean that. We could limit the capacity of schools where they go, in terms of how many classrooms they have to utilize and that will create a savings as well. So I do wanna say that those two are in red because they do directly impact the site, but there are things that districts do when they're in a fiscal crisis like this to be able to address, those and create additional savings. And so scenario two was to not do the second thing,
right? Like, so the second scenario is to not move into that location, and that brings you back about $1,500,000 This is just I spoke over this but I just want to share this because I think the size and the number of schools and the age of our facilities is really critical because it does create a, need to maintain those those properties. If you'll notice in '20 in 1819, that was the structure of the buildings and grounds budget. We made the shift to move custodial in there, and you could see where we currently sit in terms of staffing.
But also that green area, what are the materials and supplies they need to do their job? Right now, that's at $4,600,000 that is currently coming to support Resource eight thousand one hundred and fifty dollars for custodial. So now we'll move to the Buildings and Grounds Department. One of the things that you can see, it is legally mandated to be budgeted at 3% of your general expenditures and miss Grant Dawson had talked about that. That is about $27,000,000 The reason why that law exists is because during the fiscal crises in the past,
districts stopped funding their maintenance program and the state saw that that was an issue so the state put in the 3% minimum for school districts and remember it is a minimum, that they're supposed to fund. You can go below that 3%. The problem with going below the 3% is it creates a cascade of impacts that makes the district not eligible potentially for proposition two funding, that could support the proposition two with many projects that will be applying to the state, but it is an option that the board has in front of them to potentially
go below that 3%. That may create some audit findings for the district and we've done a lot over the last couple years to get out of those audit findings, but that would be an audit finding that you would not be meeting your 3% minimum. We are also, and this is the part that is incredibly difficult to talk about because the district had a issue around, there's a need of about $7,000,000 to address the deferred maintenance issues across the district. We reduced we never had enough to fund it beyond five. At the blueprint, the district had a choice as to whether or not they could close schools or
whether or not they would reduce the deferred maintenance. They did deferred reduce the deferred maintenance down to 3,000,000. This would further reduce the deferred maintenance fund by $2,000,000 which means it would leave with a million dollars left and Ms. Grant Dawson and I have gone over that for like boiler replacements and some of those critical infrastructure systems we believe that you would need about a million dollars left to be able to address some of those scenarios across our schools. That's an additional $2,000,000 We are in the process of a master plan and there will be a study session in December on this.
I want you to look at the blue and this is just, you know, there there are trade offs and and compromises around all of this. The blue is the the stacked up amount of deferred maintenance by each of the board districts. And if you look at the 400, the 400 is not $400 it's $400,000,000 Right? And so this shows that your this is the current state of your district around, how much deferred maintenance is built up across each of the four districts, also admin, also charter schools, and also our vacant properties.
If you see the on the right, each of those years on there is showing you the additional systems that will go end of life and need to be replaced at a certain point. So I just wanted as as as we're talking about these things just so that you understand the implication for them, we are lucky that we do have Measure Y as a bond that does support some of this work, but the dollar amount that's there is so significant that you do need to have, resources available to address that. And if we come to emergency situations, the board is gonna have to find the funding to be able to pay for
that, regardless. And that's what your reserve is important, to be able to utilize. So buildings and grounds scenario two would be just to, eliminate that $2,000,000 from the deferred maintenance fund, fund 14, and bring it back into the general fund to support the the reductions. Enrollment department, the enrollment department, the board passed enrollment stabilization policy. That entire department was funded on one time funds, that initiative. And those those funds do not, reset, but they're it's set set to expire at the end of the year.
So essentially, there has been some movement around management positions in the past, but I do wanna say that the elimination of that effort will happen at the end of this year without board action, and so there's not really any money there. It's just letting you know that that money and those supports that go to school sites that have been effective in improving our enrollment will be sunsetted at the end of this year. I think the reason there's a difference between the $9,000,000 and the $8,000,000 is that if you want to continue that work there are several options within that,
but the minimum investment we see to sustain that work would be about $1,000,000 and we want to be upfront about that. Finally I'm gonna go through two other departments. These departments are not funded by the general fund but they can support the general fund. And so one of the things is there's been a lot of dialogue around the sustainability policy and about the work and some of the movement to solar and some of the upgrades that we're doing. It does pay direct dividends for the District in terms of what it does to offset our utility costs. Miss Grant Dawson showed you that there was that bottom line around services,
dollars 29,000,000. Dollars 20,000,000 of that is actually the cost for utilities, the lights, the trash, the all the different things that it keeps to keep the school running. We have several bond funded projects that are gonna come online for solar that this year we'll start saving $380,000 Next year the total savings will be about $1,300,000 and we are looking at this as ways to offset the overall, general fund in all of the future facility projects that are moving forward. So just that is a place where your bond program can support the general fund
by investing in more sustainable options particularly around solar and we have an audit going on right now and we'll be presenting that to the facilities committee to just kind of share out what some other opportunities might be in the twenty seven-twenty eight year. Finally Fund thirteen, just the history of Fund thirteen. It was actually one of the departments that was called out in 2000, because it was taking almost a significant contribution from the general fund that led to the state loan. In 2019, it was taking it was continuing to take a contribution. We have reversed that. It no longer takes a contribution from the general fund and now it is supporting
the general fund and we just this just this year, actually last week, we've identified some drivers that could have been covered under fund 13 and we've already made the move to ship them over in to Fund 13 and that will be a $300,000 savings this year. So those are the the main departments within the division and I will hand it over to miss Grant Dawson. Okay. So my area is, simple as it relates to, how I define the scenarios. So ultimately, the fiscal services department has, at this point,
is proposed to be half the size it was in two thousand eighteen, nineteen. So there are a lot of components that we've talked about tonight that the board, the district has not been able to prioritize in a balancing way. So you just heard about facilities and deferred maintenance. The district was not funding its deferred maintenance before I came, and we began to fund it in twenty twenty twenty twenty one. Built $5,000,000 into the budget, and then the very next year reduced it to 3,000,000, and we've been seeking to carry the 3,000,000
going forward. You know, that correlation is to have that many facilities open, just like with business services with a lot of different, resources that we have. Again, about a 170 resources and all the compliance in addition to your payroll accounts payable and other areas, that's what business services does. So, you know, with that, we've been on the pathway to, reduce, the position that, I sit in, which again is not funded out of the base general fund. And that was also due to before I came in the district had a consultant
as I've shared before. You weren't funding the chief business officer consultant out of the base. Nobody does that, but we did. And not only did we do that, there have been iterations of this infrastructure where there were more directors and more support. Because, again, this is a very large district with multiple funds, and the 170 resources I'm ex describing is only in the general fund. So we still have another 11 funds that we're responsible for. And so with that being said,
what is going to happen is I really focus on and continue to try to focus on, making sure that based on the ask, we'll still have. Right? The district's not folding up and going away. So we do need to make sure that we're taking care of making sure that payroll is taken care of. Payroll is not just like talent. It's not the activity solely to take care of making sure that people get a check at the end of the month or semimonthly. And then we did talk talk about it, budget and finance. We're the only district in the state of California that does semimonthly payroll.
So, therefore, we have more payrolls that we run, for some employee groups, and that's classified and certificated. But with that Nuance, in addition to, right, you're managing all of the different bargaining unit agreements and all of the changes therein, We take care of people's today and tomorrow. Your today and tomorrow. So that's your paycheck today, your retirement tomorrow. And there's a lot of components that are required. So by the time you reach that, wonderful place of being able to retire, we have between talent and payroll activities that we are responsible for to make sure
that you can move into, that capacity. And so with that, I focus on that as well as making sure that we're able to pay our payables. Our district has a lot of community based organizations as well as other partnerships that are very local that ultimately rely on the district's, agreements to maintain themselves. So where we will see the majority of the effort as far as change is a reduction in budget and accounting. A lot of the strategy work, the work that we have, done as we already know to,
you know, exit, support the district in building a strategy to exit receivership. I think because we really just don't get these moments to to celebrate much because there's always a a downer in the midst of celebration is, you know, when I came, we had 13 consistent audit findings. This year, we'll be at four, and none of those are the same audit findings that we started with. So a lot of the work that we've done to make adjustments, we have not been in the newspaper as it relates to payroll since 2018. And so that was, right, a high time,
right, when the district was having various challenges, but it was also because we couldn't recruit the right talent. We couldn't, you know, recruit the right balance of talent. And so we've done that, but, ultimately, they will be responsible for maintaining a lot of this work. Budget development will look very different as it relates to activity based on the scenario one and scenario two. It means again, and you saw an earlier slide, there'll be less autonomy. We essentially be taking the budget and saying, here's where the adjustments are in revenues. Where do you wanna make the adjustment?
It's not a build up. It's an adjusting type budget activity. So there'll be more about how that looks, but it ultimately will reduce, a lot of that professional capacity. We've talked also about, how many, grants and other resources we apply for. We won't have the capacity to manage all of those resources going forward, with having, less staff and then also how we streamline some of the activities that we do have, to be able to provide the right areas of focus, again, for all of the school sites and departments that we have because that's ultimately who
we service plus all of the other funds. So just simply put the difference between one and two. It's just one has, more, FTE, which is one. And then number two just has two less FTE. And so therefore making, you know, that adjustment, going forth. So that is, business services. That does not include procurement. I made no reductions or adjustments to procurement. Again, I made reductions in historically, every year that I've been here, we've made, reductions. So procurement, I grew. When I came, there were two people in procurement purchasing. So with the millions of dollars that we spend in purchasing,
there were two people, and we've grown that. Again, there are directors and division leaders that manage multiple divisions as well as the way that this position supports multiple divisions. Mister Thomas and I made a transition last year, where, I previously held, facilities, which most CBOs do, in, under, my administration, and we transitioned that as part of a plan transition, with the district for when I came. So we've done that part of the transition. And then, ultimately, we'll be working on just maintaining, and supporting to the best of,
the district's ability. We also are very, connected to the parcel taxes as well. So another area we've talked about is where this position, and other positions are present. That will also change where we will not be able to be as present and visible just due to there will be less, staff, to be able to support, those particular areas. So more to come just based on, how the board moves and what those details are as far as impact. But, again, the main focus was if we can maintain, because the resolution, calls for a substantial reduction in management.
I think you're seeing this common theme that we, you you know, the board will have to determine whether or not it meets meets the definition of substantial, but we hit a lot of high notes as it relates to, maintaining, positions that are nonmanagement and reducing positions that were management, to be able to support, the board's goals. So with that, I will pass this on to the senior school improvement. Good evening, everyone. I'm Sondra Aguilar. I'm the chief academic officer for our district and I lead the continuous school improvement division. I'll take you through a couple of the scenarios, that were lifted up in the resolution,
passed by the board. But first, I wanna just do a little bit of framing. We have about eight different funds that go into the the overall district budget. I just wanna call out, child development, because that is a separate fund from the general fund. When you look at the programs within child development, they have to balance to the $34,700,000 that are listed there. So they don't dip into the general fund in terms of the program. The same can be said about adult education. So adult education, it's a mighty program.
It is a small budget. It's $4,200,000. So we're not talking about those programs in this, presentation, and you can see that they sit in separate funds from the general fund. So we're gonna mainly talk about the blue area and then, as our CBO Grant Dawson walked us through, we're really gonna concentrate on the, budget within the LCAP and I'll walk us through a little bit of that. So you saw this slide earlier, supplemental and concentration, the emphasis is on balancing to zero because you always have to show that there,
that we are using all the funds towards student services and that's why the LCAP is so important. It takes months to put together, to get it right, and then there's a lot of oversight with reviewing that. So oftentimes I hear conversations in different forums where it's stated, oh, let's redo something over here, and then we can free that up to pay for something, that's really considered a base cost. And so you just have to be careful with that, you know, term of, like, moving things from, base to supplemental concentration.
It has to have a rationale, and we have to prove that it is always going towards student services. So a lot of the base costs are not permissible in these funds. Other, key terms that are important and why we're so focused, on attendance not only for, the educational benefit, but also because this is how our funding is allocated. They, the state takes the average daily attendance, and you get that portion. So if we are attending school 90% of the time, you you will get 90% of the total, allocation.
So it's always important because you're losing 10% if you're attending 90% of the time. Another important factor is the notion of equity within the local control funding formula and that is, serving our low income students, foster youth, and English language learners. So every year when we collect those lunch forms at school sites this is the calculation, that gets lifted up and every school has a percentage of students that they're serving that are considered unduplicated and that's the UPP percentage.
So it's really important to keep track of this because it matters as you, allocate services. So this came up in the teaching and learning, session, and there was, like, an, quirky moment where it was like, how do you actually calculate that? And I was like, let me just bring the slide forward next time because I don't wanna get it, incorrect. So of the LCFF, base grant, concentration is at 65%. The 55% is important because you have to serve schools and allocate services to schools
that serve above 55% unduplicated. And so, there was a couple years ago, there was a legislation, you know, passed that said that you must, direct services to these schools that serve, high rates of unduplicated students, and it must be mostly in personnel. There was a shift there. And so that was a big change in our district. Also, for the supplemental grant, it's 20% of the base grant. So you can see the breakdown of, what that means. I won't walk you through each of the, points,
but you get different amounts of money to serve different, grade spans of students. And there's instructional minutes that are allocated that you must meet and so you get a little bit more money because there's more minutes, as you go up the grade spans. So the targets that we're lifting up, is 54,700,000.0 that was from last year for concentration grant and then for supplemental it's 53,900,000.0. So again just going back to this target of a 119,000,000, you have to at least show how you're spending, those funds every time that you're reporting out in the LCAP.
Moving forward, you all know that LCAP is bigger than supplemental and concentration. We report out on local measures as well, g one g and measure h and n, also the titles, titles one through four. And I'm specifically lifting this up because we are going to project reductions in the title funds, this upcoming budget cycle because of the unknown at the federal level. We're hearing that there will likely be a termination of, titles two through four and a reduction of 15% at title one.
So we need to be mindful of this when we're thinking about services because you're gonna have a reduction most likely. And then included in the LCAP are grants, that our departments and schools, apply for and receive. We have a lot of philanthropy that, also donates, to our programming. And then, really, it's supposed to be any fund that shows your services above the base, that go into the LCAP. So, in the resolution, there were a couple of, directives that asked to see two scenarios and I'll walk us through those scenarios.
For scenario one it was a reduction of 14 positions, for scenario two it's a reduction of 14 positions, for both of the scenarios, we're maintaining the number of departments, but you're reducing the, the FTE or the people in those departments. And then, you all know that our, division goes after a lot of grants. It's year to year, and so there's a lot of movement there. We will have more, employees that will be noticed as they are regularly noticed because grant funds will shift.
And so it's a normal part of the, budget cycle, but it's important to point out because you'll see these numbers will fluctuate as we either, get confirmation that there are, more grant funds coming or we're losing, grant funds that are going to cycle off. So important to point that out, Anne, to say that there are an additional nine positions that we're lifting up that will be reduced. That's sitting more in the central office portion and not necessarily in, the network structure. So I'll go through that right now. So, for elementary,
we are, giving the first scenario. It is a scenario where there are no network superintendents. Also to, stress, each of the departments, they have staff that are aligned to the networks. So when you reduce in a network, you're also needing to consider the reduction of, different positions in all of the departments. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We have in academics, there are people that are assigned to do STEM work, and you have that assigned by networks.
So you have five networks. So you should have at least five people, that are part of that structure. Excuse me. If we are reducing a network, we're also simultaneously reducing by a department partner. So in each of the departments you'll see that we're reducing by some staff because they are aligned to the network. So the structure is, a deputy chief and then two deputy network superintendents, and we would have, two network partners. So that's how I think it breaks down,
to a reduction in two network superintendents, a reduction in the network partner. The network partner is responsible for ensuring that the school can function, and they also ensure that a lot of the operational activities of the schools are taken care of. I'm getting lots of water. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. So, and then, also, the department partners, you'll see those reductions. And this one actually, this scenario, adds a deputy network superintendent. So you can see the breakdown and these are the different positions,
a network superintendent, by two, a network partner, you're adding a deputy network superintendent, you have teachers on special assignment that are aligned to the network, you have content coordinators, program managers, a specialist, and the MTSS partner. So these are the positions that are impacted when we're reducing, a network. So the draft scenario two for elementary is the, two networks, two network superintendents. You can see the distribution of schools there. We have 49 total schools that we serve. They would each have a department partner.
And then again the breakdown is that we would be reducing a deputy network superintendent, a network partner, and then the associated department partners, which are listed here. And I won't go through each of them again but it's very similar because anytime you touch the network there's also associated staff that are supporting that network that will be impacted, by the reductions. For, secondary, I wanna be clear on this one because the original, approach was thinking that we were to combine, middle schools and high schools together. That is not the case.
So the network structure is not, impacted. We're not pushing middle school and, high schools together. But what we are projecting is a reduction in the support staff. So you would have the support staff, those department partners, supporting all 29 schools. And they would expand to serving sixth through twelfth graders. So these are the impacts that you would have. Lastly, these are the positions that are in the scenario, that would be impacted. Then I mentioned at the beginning of my section that we would have an initial
nine possessions positions that would be reduced, and this is the breakdown, a director or two directors, two specialists, two TSAs, two content coordinators, and, an analyst. So, there's more, reductions in addition to, adjusting for the network structure. One, thing before this is that, when we look at the services within the division, it's really important to be clear about what the role of the central office is. There are very few, positions that do direct service to students within the central office.
So that's important to point out. Additionally, the role of the central office is to develop the capacity of the adults that work with our, students. And that's what the emphasis is in a lot of the services that we provide. We also do, direct allocations to school sites through this department. So when you think of tutors, that is an allocation that is assigned to school sites. When you think of, case managers, those are, positions that are assigned directly to school sites. They don't sit in the central office,
but they are supported, by staff that, work in the central office. So I'm wanting to distinguish between those types of services, and, again, we did not project an impact on school based services, in the direct way, but you can see indirectly when you're reducing content coordinators that will impact the instructional support. When you're reducing an analyst that will be impacting, RAD, the Research Assessment, Data Department. And so that's the ability to produce dashboards that give you information.
So all of these, reductions, they impact the overall service, but they may not be a direct impact, to school sites, but eventually it does get to an indirect impact on school sites when you make reductions. I did have a chance to poll our, our principals, and I asked them three layers of questions. I asked what services do your students need to be successful? I asked them what services does your staff need to be successful? And what services do you need, to be successful. And the top positions, and references were literacy tutors,
they were case managers, they were teachers on special assignment, and they were, community school managers. In the elementary, span of principals, an emphasis was on maintaining the network structure. So that's for you to consider in terms of, the opinions of our principals. We will be expanding that to our SSCs, that, you know, do a lot of the work on the school site plan. And additionally, I know that ACC is also working through surveys to collect information about, student opinions on services.
So we'll take that or we'll bring that back especially to the teaching and learning committee once that is ready. So that's the end of my section and I'll pass it back to, Dan. Okay. So just to wrap up before I, hand it back to doctor Sadler, Scenario one, right. So we've got our unrestricted savings column of 16,800,000 and that is where the impact on the $82,000,000 structural deficit would come with the exception of the S and C reference there.
Right? So if our goal is to try and address the structural deficit, we're talking about $13,000,000 in unrestricted. We included restricted and made possible, proposed reductions there or savings there in the spirit of the resolution to reduce overall management. Right? So even though we might not get even though we might not address the structural deficit with some management reductions because they're in restricted savings or an S and C, it's still included in here because we want to,
still pursue that path that the resolution was asking us to around the overall substantial and significant reduction in restructuring of central management. And so scenario one, total savings, again, backing out the S and C and the restricted, but total savings would be $1,800,000 for 51.5 people FTE. And then scenario two, slightly lower amounts there, total of 18,800,000.0 and 47 and a half FTE. And I'll hand it over to you,
doctor Sankal. Okay. Now just moving on to our next steps, we will continue working on our recommendations and, be prepared to continue the discussion at our next meeting on December 3. And so Okay. Okay. Right now, we'll have, public comment. Thank you, President Brochard. I'd like to move the board, to direct the superintendent, to follow additional actions as outlined in the board memo drafted by, yourself and I.
Janine legal counsel Janine Lindsay, do you have that available? And is there a second to this motion? I second it. Can you just repeat, for the public, it wasn't clear we're hearing through the KDOL and your Sure. I'd like to move the board to direct the superintendent to follow additional actions as outlined in the board memo drafted by myself and director Brohard. And I believe director Brohard seconded the motion. And you have the document and you have, reviewed it with us. Point of clarification. What memo? So I think, vice president Bachelor is referring to the cover memo for,
amendment to the resolution. So she there's act they're actually bringing forward an amendment. That's not what was just said, an amendment to what then? The resolution that's on the agenda. Miss Lindsey, can you, explain it so that it can go through it. Thank you. We will be projecting it shortly, and we will review, the changes that we've made. Yeah. So here's the amendment that you shared you would like to bring forward tonight. It's on the screen. I'm hoping folks can see that there. No. Okay. I don't know why I said that. Okay. Alright. So you, I believe there may even be other board members who have amendments,
but this is pinch it a little bit. Okay. Alright. I'll read it then. Okay. Now, therefore, it be resolved that the Board directs the superintendent to prepare at least two budget scenarios for community input and board review that total $100,000,000 in budget adjustments budget scenarios. The budget scenario will include both the costs and the impacts on students. The budget scenarios will not include school closures or mergers. Now, therefore do you want me to just read the changes? Yes. So I was just getting to this current, resolution language.
So under item 1c, provide options for restructuring the middle school and high school networks to ensure cost savings and efficiency, the Board directs the staff to explore further option of restructuring the middle school network as one body and restructuring the high school network as one body, therefore keeping the two networks separate. Under Item 1D, budget reductions must include substantial restructuring of the central office, including significantly reducing our administrative overhead and positions reducing spending on outside services and contracts
and centralizing budget decisions for academic alignment and efficiency. The Board directs the staff to prepare a plan to curb outsourcing services and contracts for jobs that are in the bargaining units. This plan should include recruitment and hiring strategies. The Board directs the superintendent to provide information on cost savings from the recommendations of the Ad Hoc Outsourcing Task Force Committee I'm sorry, Task Force to the December 3 meeting. The Board understands that this is a complex situation and that requires investigation and analysis.
Therefore, if the plan is not ready by December 3, the special meeting, staff is directed to update the Board on the progress of these plans and to set a date certain for the final plan to be brought to the Board. Under Item 2A, the superintendent will ensure we are continuing work to increase our district's enrollment. The superintendent will provide a comprehensive plan for improving daily attendance at each site, including monitoring and supporting support for schools struggling to improve attendance. A 1% increase in attendance would yield approximately $5,250,000
The Board directs the staff to prepare a comprehensive plan to improve daily attendance at each site and to present this plan to the Board at the December Meeting. Again, the Board recognizes that developing new ways of increasing attendance requires much investigation and analysis of the problem. Therefore, if the staff is unable to prepare the plan by this date, the staff is directed to update the Board on the progress of this work at the December and to present the final plan to the Board at a date to
be determined on December 3. Number three, leveraging other agencies and resources: A, provide options for potential cost savings from leveraging other agencies and resources. The Board directs staff to discuss with the Alameda County Office of Education the possibility of contracting services, including but not limited to credentialing, staff pipelines, payroll and any other supports that the county can provide that would to, alleviate the general fund. Number three, on programs and services. Sorry, number five. Let me make a second.
Thank you. Number five, inventory the district's programs and services, assess their usage and impact on student achievement, and identify programs and or services that could be consolidated or eliminated for the twenty twenty five-twenty six and twenty twenty six-twenty seven. Staff will present to a Teaching and Learning Committee and recommendations from that committee will be brought to the full board. The Board directs the Chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee and the staff to report recommendations from the committee to the Board by the December 10 Board meeting. B, allocation to school sites and prioritization of additional programs,
positions and services will be presented to Teaching and Learning for discussion and recommendation to the full Board for inclusion in the final budget balancing proposal. The Board directs the Chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee and staff to report recommendations from the Committee to the Board by the December 10 Board meeting. Mandated 3% reserve in twenty twenty five-twenty six, the Board directs the superintendent to identify additional budget balancing options, including but not limited to contract freezes or cancellations, reducing conference and travel fees, or consolidating purchases and department reimbursables, for example,
hotspots, cellular plans, and software. The Board directs the superintendent to present additional adjustments to the twenty twenty five-twenty six budget so that the mandated 3% reserve can be attained. Be it further resolved that the Board directs the superintendent to include in the budget balancing scenarios revenue that the district will receive from the state, including: one) Proposition 98 monies that were allocated in previous years, but were not released California school districts, but are set to be released in the '62,
Community Redevelopment Fund Grant three, Student Support and Professional Development Discretionary Block Grant and four, carryover monies from all measures, taxes and fees collected by the school district. And then finally, be it further resolved that the superintendent or delegate will present to the Board will present the Board with proposed adjustments that will total $100,700,000 Be it further resolved that the Board directs the superintendent of schools or designee to present to the Board on 12/10/2025 for its consideration and possible adoption budget scenarios
and recommendation without restriction that will result in a balanced budget for fiscal years twenty twenty five-twenty six, twenty six-twenty seven. Public comment. No, no, no. Board comment first, please. There's an amendment on the floor. We've sat here for two hours. You could have made that amendment at the start, but let's please have board comment first, especially since you just hijacked everyone with throwing out a non vetted resolution or an amendment to it. I'm sorry. Public comment does come first. So I hope the public's not a comment on how we were disrespected,
told to sit here for two hours, and then just amend it. That doesn't show anything how to find the rest of the budget cuts. I think this is So this whole thing is objectionable. This is the work you should have done before, and it's so disrespectful to everyone. And we all know this wasn't vetted. This was vetted. How would how is this vetted where this is gonna get another $80,000,000? We have 15 speakers. Let's give, two minutes each. Two minutes. Okay. So the speakers are Violin Venezuela, Simone Landry, Sheila Haines, Carol Delton, Megan Tree, David Kokeshiva,
Gary Yee, Ma Elena Perez, Danielle Otlin, Oliver Brennan, Mark Tafoya, Jack Nelson, JD Willinson, Misty Cross, and Kampala Tas Rasmussen. And one more additional speaker, Catherine Camp. If they're students, they should speak first. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So my friend Violet wasn't had to leave, but, I'm gonna read her statement. Hello, everyone. I'm Violet. Unfortunately, I am unable, to attend this meeting fully, but, hopefully, as much as can reach you. I cannot stress enough how much restorative justice improves our community.
Not only does it decrease harm at our school and a at Atabir Middle School, it helps people find out who they are and want to be. Before I discovered RJ, I was quiet, shy, and didn't even really know how to get people to listen to me. However, in fifth grade, EMBS, EBMS brought an RJP community building circle to my class, and I immediately knew that this was for me. From then on, I've been more confident with my speaking and just improved about how I feel about myself in general. So please include RJ in your budget plans and then expand the program at other schools. Let other students feel the way that I did.
Thank you. Madam President, may I ask one question? Just sorry to interrupt. They're able to make copies in our but there may be a little bit of sound. Will you want them to proceed with that? Okay. Hello. I'm Jules. I'm at Edna Brewer Middle School. Megan was unable to deliver this statement, so I'm doing it for her. Hi. My name is Megan, and I am an LL at Edna Brewer Middle School. An LL is a leader of the leader. In RJ, or Restorative Justice, it's a vital part of our school and engages our community greatly. I have seen firsthand how that our restorative justice practices has affected me,
my peers, and the entirety of our school. Restorative justice cannot be dwindled down to conflict mediation. Peer RJ is a practice that builds a community strong enough to handle conflict. To move and grow through it. Or, sorry. Peer RJ has provided students who are less involved a space to lead and to learn. Oakland is stereotyped as a violent and distasteful learning environment. You sit and preach about youth involvement, and restorative justice is the perfect solution to this. Here, RJ, is what OUSD is in dire need of. Thank you. Okay. This is my statement and not Violet's.
So, hi. I'm CC again. And like one other person here, I'm a PRRG leader at EBMS. Our school has always felt like a community, other spaces and like other spaces I've experienced. Our circles and workshops strengthen our bond to each other and minimize the risk of harm. What happened at Skyline last week was horrible, and that kind of harm and conflict should be addressed and restored before it ever has the chance to grow into something as awful as that. You want to center the needs of students. Please address this issue and fund more restorative justice programs and more middle and high
schools in the district. The solution for this is not more police in schools. Thank you. Are there other student speakers? Okay. If your name was called, if you could line up by the dais. And the students did an excellent job. If you could remember to also say your name as you speak. Thank you. Now what are we doing? What's this item? What's this item? You're speaking on the pub on the, proposed resolution. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. I gotta get my notes together. So we're talking about budgets and cuts, custodians, teachers, push in, pull out staff, important people at these school sites. The focus should be around the students.
We shouldn't be talking about budgets that have a $100,000 on it and all of these things that make no sense. All you gotta do is just get straight to the point. We voted for four board members to understand the people. We put you guys in these seats so that we can have the votes to align with what we need done for our schools. We thought you guys understood. But here we are again in the same position. We we got out of the Broadway location because the rent was too high. Now we have our own building, and we still can't manage funds. So I'm, I'm unclear on why we had all these numbers up here when we can just
make it make sense. Make sure we staff up the schools, custodians, teachers, special ed teachers, everybody that is important on the site that will make these students be successful. Not asking a principal what would make the school more successful. The students need to feel supported. Their voices need to be heard. The student directors come every week with the report from the, student council. And I don't think they're being heard because the students are coming back with reports, and we are just ignoring them. We're getting ready to organize. I'm telling you guys, this makes no sense.
We're talking about you had something up here that we knew nothing about. And I'm asking, can we get some copies? We're at a facility where these meetings happen, and we can have copies. It should have been at the door. We shouldn't have been duped with this at the last minute. It makes no sense. Half of us don't know the acronyms that you guys were talking about. We need to be included. This needs to be a transparent meeting. This shouldn't just talk about money, because we can stop the money. Once we start organizing and getting together, you won't even have to worry about money. I'll do it in English. My name is Marielena Perez,
and I'm an administrative assistant at Bergman Preschool, also part of SEIU and the bargaining team. I want to invite you to ensure that the budget adjustments do not hit our SEIU members. Historically, SEIU has been affected by the cuts, and we cannot continue to observe those blows to our members. We want you guys to show commitment. We have shown our commitment as SEIU every time we've been sitting at the table. We've been working late. We've been burning that oil, late night oil, to make sure that we ensure a fair contract to our team members.
And we're still waiting for the country proposals from today. So that's it. Good evening. My name is Danielle Ottlin, and I'm an occupational therapist proudly serving the special education population at OUSD. Thank you. I love my students. I wanna urge the district to ensure that any budget adjustments do not fall on SEIU members. Historically, as, Alaina has said, SEIU has been disproportionately impacted with the reductions and eliminations, and we can't we can't continue to be one of the first places the district looks to make
cuts. This is especially important as we sit at the bargaining table. SEIU has shown our commitment. We've been at the bargaining table all day today. We have been putting in the work, and we have been rolling up our sleeves, and we have been burning the midnight oil as we have been asked to do by the district. If we are expected to bargain in good faith under the weight of the proposed adjustments, then we expect the district to show up tomorrow and with the same intention, the preparedness, and the seriousness that we have been showing for the past eight months of bargaining.
And, Janine, the SEIU bargaining team is still waiting on your team to send the SEIU counter proposals that you presented today, so thank you. Good evening, board president Brohard, directors, interim superintendent Sadler. The, budget proposal, that was presented, and I think the, the supplemental one, it looks like a good start, and I'll comment more on that in a moment. But I'm going to take a moment because today, OEA educators and community members really stood in solidarity with school communities at Harriet Tubman CDC
and Hoover Elementary School after reports of ICE, terrorized parents, at drop off and an OEA member. We are outraged by the idea that ICE is in our community, that ICE is in Oakland. But we're also incredibly proud, because both school communities immediately implemented safety protocols that kept our schools and communities safe. Around 9AM, OEA was alerted that, ICE was, that ICE was present. We activated our rapid response,
system, and within minutes, hundreds of community allies showed up to ensure that our schools remain safe and our, community was supported. This is what Oakland does. We show up for one another. OEA is deeply, deeply grateful to every single educator, family member, neighbor who stood with us today in some of the most scariest moments. So I wanna just say as, OEA president that immigrants are welcome here, and ICE needs to get out of Oakland.
Tonight, we ask the board to do what I think you're attempting to do here, which is redirect your priorities on a student centered budget. That means reprioritizing away from the inflated spending on the highest paid administrators and outside contractors. We have outside contractors, spending up to $201,000,000. We want you to spend that money on, school based staff who serve our students every single day. OUSD has, this practice of over projecting expenses
and under projecting revenue. And what that does is manufacture a bleak outlook that justifies cuts rather than investments. Our students and our educators deserve better, especially now in this moment. Right now, we need schools to be stable. They need consistent staffing. They need caring adults who are present and supported. They need to be our schools need to be safe, safe from ice and safe from gun violence. We are deeply disheartened
by what happened at Skyline. Now the third shooting in a very few short years, our students walked out demanding gun safety. Parents have reached out demanding action. 82 OEA members at Skyline are demanding that every what every educator deserves, a safe workplace. At the very minimum, during this upcoming break, we are asking that you ensure that every classroom have a lock on both sides of the door, that you install cameras and buzzers at entry points and complete the long discussed gate
improvements that should have already been underway. We have raised these issues repeatedly in our article 17 safety meetings. Gun violence cannot be tolerated on any of our campuses. We already lost a a a Oakland legend, John Beam, a former OEA member to this crisis of gun violence. Skyline doesn't need more policing. Skyline needs more caring adults, more counselors, case managers, psychologists, social workers. And these are the things that are gonna make our schools safe, and these are the things that we are bargaining for.
And that is why we are asking for a student centered budget. Thank you. If your name was called earlier, if you wouldn't mind going over near the dias now so we can make sure we can hear all our public speakers. Good evening, board and superintendent. My name is Carol Dalton. It was clear to me from the beginning that addressing this budget deficit would not be something where you could take one swath of any part of the budget, but that it is going to take smaller swaths from I don't even know if
I'm pronouncing that right, from different areas. So I wanna speak about some things, that I've investigated from special education. One of the reasons for the the budget, of the transportation budget being so high is that there are no longer geographically close options for our NPS, our non public school students. Giving a lease to an NPS either in a vacant building or a building where a Prop 39 lease is expiring this year would create that possibility not only for
potentially some tuition savings but certainly for up to a million dollars in transportation savings. According to information presented by the Director of Special Education, last year, OUSD contracted out 55 speech language pathologists and 22 psychologists. Based on calculations from other numbers presented to the CAC, I believe that bringing every position that comes in house will save around $90,000 So there is 4 to $6,000,000
that could be saved in that area. I suggest peer to peer outreach because I will believe as a speech language pathologist, another speech language pathologist about their working conditions. And my time is running out, so I'd like to mention just one more thing right here, which is that, iReady costs the district $600,000 a year. DIBELS, another 75,000. I couldn't find the numbers on Spire and Lexia. Those are your four in house programs. And then there were the five contract programs that I mentioned at the last board
meeting. Certainly, there is overlap and duplication, and you can streamline education, make literacy more effective by training teachers in a common modality. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi. I'm JD Woloshen. I've got two kids in this district, and, I think I'm with everybody in the room. And I know a lot of people have expressed it already that, you know, we all want to maintain local control, and I know there's a lot of people that are, like, you know, really hounding on this issue. And I just wanna say that,
there's no point in keeping local control if we are going to abandon our, values, ahead of time to to keep it. If we're gonna implement the same solutions that an outsider would, then, then what's the point? And so that's why I appreciate, the efforts so far of this resolution and that everybody has been putting in to, to maintain open values, because I I think that, it's obviously like, the numbers don't add up yet. Right? We we can see that the savings proposed.
And, you know, when I was looking at this before this meeting, I couldn't make heads or tail of it. And and I think that the context that was put into it in terms of, you know, what's not gonna happen, with which when these positions go away. I I appreciated that, but I'm still not fully understanding. And not everything was explained in here. There's there's, I know that there's, positions in the special education department that are going away that were not talked about tonight. So we haven't gotten even the full picture yet, but I do appreciate I know that it's not ideal that we're getting a last
minute, resolution, amendment, but we clearly have to do more. And so that's trying to make it, you know, fix it within, you know, frame framed with our values. Good evening. My name is Gary. My name is Gary Yi. I was I am a member of the Measure n, Measure h Commission, and I co sponsored the original legislation passed in 2013 by voters and reauthorized in 2022. And I want to thank Director Williams who was a part of that campaign committee. I was also here as a Board member in 2002 when we were taking over
last time and I understand the pressure and the dilemmas that you face. The one piece in this that made me turn and rewrite my entire speech was with reference to the concern about the mandated 3% reserve. And that has language in it that impacts the viability, the vitality and the promise we made to the voters in 2013 and 2022 about how we would spend that money. This measure is not a measure simply about the Board,
it's about the community as a whole. 82% of the voters in Oakland voted for this because they had confidence that the legislation would be fairly, and consistently and faithfully, adhered to. I'm here today because I saw this, the reference to the reserve and now I'm looking at the amendment of the reserve and it deeply concerns me because of the reference to carryover monies from all measures, taxes and fees collected by the school district. Our schools, which are the beneficiaries,
our high schools which are the beneficiaries of the measure and measure h money, have spent the money so wisely that once in a while they they are able to carry over money because they chose not to spend it and to save it for when they have the program that was approved on their EIP. That that is an important that is an important promise that we made to the schools and we made to the communities that we would use this money fairly and safely. And I'm alarmed, and I hope that the board will deliberate whether this is an appropriate and legal
and moral and civic and student facing, school facing, school supporting, family embracing, initiative and whether this resolution with its amendments is faithful to that promise that we made. So, that is the most important part to me why I've come. I support your work. We did not talk about the you did not yet talk about the 3% mandated reserve. And to use taxpayer money for that is unconscionable. Thank you. Alright. My name is Jack Nelson.
I am a 1972 graduate of Skyline High, and I was a friend to John Beam. I'm not gonna get into that now. I'm gonna stick to the budget. I think the salaries are, what, 867,000,000? I think that's what I saw out there. Hey, I'm talking now. And I know that you're loud. If we can have respect for the speakers, please. Thank you. We go ahead, please. So, that's between 2 and 300 that 2 and $300,000,000. I would I would say do a 3% pay cut to anybody who makes over
120,000. That would make you between 6 and 9,000,000 back. You need ADA monitors, people to go to people's homes and get kids back in school. The kids that, shot up the other day hadn't been there for over a month. I talked to one of the teachers. Third, Mike, you're not gonna like this maybe, but they, we become the landlords of places. We don't sell them, but we're landlord, and we put in facilities there that we can rent out and we make ongoing monies. Fourth, we try to stay out of the news
and and just be real smart with our spending. As far as John Beam goes, those that know me know I've worked on it for eleven months for Tony Fardella and he to be, part of the naming of the sports complex at Skyline. That's a zero cost thing, and I've got the Oakland a's that wanna get involved. Well, excuse me. Sorry. The Golden State a's, whatever they are now, on this. So, I hope I hope we can do that. I hope we can do some of these things. Thank you. Good evening, board. My name is Oliver Brennan. I'm a parent of two students in OUSD.
So the initial resolution written has resulted in $20,000,000 savings. And tonight, we get presented with a document with more with with adjustments to the to the resolution and, you know, I was getting up here to say I I do not see how that red ink will result in four times the savings or another $80,000,000 until I saw the final paragraph just there when I'm standing up where it says that the superintendent could come back with without any restrictions.
So are all restrictions lifted now on the budgeting in this resolution that has been written in an ad hoc fashion just handed out to us all tonight, which is probably good because so far the restrictions in the resolution have meant that that the staff could only come back with $20,000,000 of savings. So, you know, the way we've been doing stuff for the last few months, last minute adjustments on the dais, like handing out documents, it's it's not the way we should be doing things. Like, is this better than actually taking a year out to to look at the entire
district and restructure it like we were supposed to be doing that got shelved last June? We could be we could be six months into this now. Is that not a better way to operate? Like last year, Lisa Grant Dawson, when she was presenting attachment c, made the point that year before it was attachment b and year before that was attachment a, and she was saying, you know, we've kinda run out of runway here. We can't be going to attachment d, which is kinda where we're going now. So good luck to you. We all need to work together, the board and and the community. We need to solve this problem because if we don't do it, the state will do it for us,
and then we'll have no control. But I would ask you to do what you need to do in this next two weeks to to to to do eight to four times as much as much savings. Maybe now with no restrictions you can. But should we not get back to a one year engagement where we look at the whole district, all the entire district centrally and the sites and look at everything and come up with a district for the next ten years? President Brughaert at the Budget and Finance meeting you said you were at a conference and you heard of a district doing that exact in that exact activity.
So maybe we should do that. Thank you very much. Next speaker please. Hi. Hello? Okay. Hi. My name is Catherine Camp, and I am from The Bay and a deeply invested homeowner with a parent to a first grader at Glenview Elementary. I stand before this board tonight in unequivocal support of the OEA's position regarding a twenty twenty six, twenty seven budget crisis. The community demands a budget that is truly student centered, one that invests in our classrooms and finally addresses the structural mismanagement that has crippled
this district for decades. This is not a sudden fiscal shock. It is a predictable consequence of sustained administrative failure. The community must question why after decades of financial distress and the opportunity afforded by protracted state receivership, a period meant to enforce fiscal rigor, the district failed to cap executive expenditures and eliminate waste. The board has a clear mandate to prevent excessive executive perks. Yet in face of austerity,
last year this district agreed to a superintendent compensation package of $452,000 and now maintains an interim superintendent compensation contract totaling 357,000. A staggering figure when compared to the maximum base salary of a veteran teacher of only a $109,000 This disparity symbolizes a profound misalignment of priorities. We also must challenge the opaque nature of the district's resource allocation. The continuation of status quo accounting methods perpetuates historical funding disparities between schools and allows
persistent hidden teacher spending gaps to worsen inequities for our high needs students. This financial uncertainty is exacerbated by OUSD's own projections. The Alameda County's office of education found that the OUSD's revenue projections were overstated by over $6,000,000 for the 2526 budget alone due to inflated attendance estimates. Miss Dawson mentioned the issue is just that we have expenditures and the LCFF funding
base resource is not enough. I wanna emphasize it's not a matter of the base funding. We're not hemorrhaging in the base. The issue is the spending practices utilized in those expenditures. The inflated consultant rates and fees we're paying when we should transition roles in house for school sites. It's the overestimated projections in object codes as a matter of creative accounting methods. Why is there a CFO and a chief buzzer budget officer? In terms of outsourcing, contracted psychologists are being paid on average $287,000.
These individuals frequently have under five years experience. If they were brought in house, they would have they would cost on average a $140,000. In terms of central office senior leadership roles, OUSD is bloated with 30 senior leadership role roles supporting on average for average daily attendance of 30,000 students across 77 schools. In comparison, San Diego Unified has a 170 school have 75 schools, but only 25 senior leadership roles supporting an ADA of 87,000
students. The district is not being held accountable. I'm gonna ask you if you could wrap that up. Yep. I will. And public trust has been lost. The board has directed staff to restructure central services. This $100,000,000 budget balancing balancing exercise must focus entirely on the central administration, exercise must focus entirely on the central administration and bureaucracy. We support, I support, the OEA's demand for no cuts to student programs or union positions. It is time for accountability to start at the top, ensuring that the burden of poor governance is finally born by the administrative center,
not the children and educators who serve them. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello. My name is Kim Ayers. I'm an East Oakland resident and an o s OUSC parent. I have two urgent requests for the board tonight. First, please stop playing politics and stop grandstanding when we are out of time. We need every minute here to get to a real resolution about how we are gonna save our district and how we are not gonna be disenfranchised yet again. Your job is to be guardians of public money that this is all of our
money, all of Oaklanders. And you are put in these positions to be elected, to be guardians of that money in the interest not of the loudest people in the room, but of all of the OUSD families who are putting your their trust in you. Second, please prioritize school quality, not school volume. There's no point in having a building when everything has been stripped down to the bone and we can't serve our kids. The current scenarios ignore the root problem. We operate nearly double the number of schools that we can afford. Closures save money.
This is the facts. I know it is not something that people want to hear. It's I'm sorry. It's math. And we maintain 20 elementary schools with fewer than 200 students. Each of those have required fixed cost in staff, building maintenance, and support from central office. The famous central office has to support 80 schools, which is double what neighboring districts like Fremont have with the exact same enrollment. I would support closing my own school so that all children can attend a richly
resourced consolidated school. Our district spends $25,000 per student. $25,000 per student. The exactly. Exactly. The kids don't see it and the teachers don't see it. The highest in large California districts. Yet, we all feel starved. We all feel starved because our $1,000,000,000 budget is spread too thin. It's too thin. This overextension causes teacher vacancies, stagnant salaries, and unacceptable facilities issues. Fewer schools mean more more resources, support, and better results for students and for teacher retention.
State takeover is a worse outcome. Please do the right thing for our kids and restructure now. Hi. I'm Emily Wasserman. I am a mom to two little kids, one, preschooler, and one is a TK er. And, I'm here today as a parent and a community member that's deeply concerned about the state of our school district. We are my experience with OUSD started off with our aftercare getting cut unexpectedly. And over my past six or so months in the district,
it's just been, a little disappointing to see that the way that we are showing up for our students. We've been going back and forth on this budget in a way that is we're talking about centering student outcomes, but we're not talking about the biggest issue right now. Our kids can't read. Our kids can't do math. And this is taking away from those conversations. We, as the adults, need to do the hard work and look at the really difficult situation we're in. I completely understand that, you know, the board, you're under immense political pressure. And this is a really tough decision,
but we need to take a really hard look at our school footprint and think about whether the sites that we're operating are truly delivering for our students and whether this is the right way to do it. We need to have a conversation about restructuring, and we need to think about how we can do that in a way that is equitable and student oriented and serves our students. As Kim mentioned before me, we are spending more than any other large district in the state, and it doesn't feel like that because of how much we are spread thin. So, we need to think about how we can do that.
And I urge you to please take action. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. My name is David Bakakisweba. I serve as a chair for the Measure N and H Commission. And as a former school board member, my last budget that I voted on was for the fiscal year twenty fourteen-twenty fifteen. And we were just beginning with the local control funding formula. And I have to say, and I just looked at the budget from twenty fourteen-twenty fifteen, the amount of revenue is about half of what you are receiving today. And you have 4,000
less students today than ten years ago. And you have nine less schools, and you got two additional parcel taxes that totaled $22,000,000 a year in annual revenue, and you paid off the loan, which means, $5,000,000 is coming to this district. You plus you have the COVID money that came through. You have I say this with greatest respect for each of you as essentially a volunteer elected official running a tough public institution in a tough town that we all love.
And I say this with greatest respect, love, and solidarity, but folks, we got to wake the fuck up now. The first thing that you all need to do, that we need to come together as a city, is that all many of these ideas that were brought up are good ideas, but it cannot be done. There's no sooner that you can cut a $100,000,000 in one fell swoop is stupid. It cannot be done. You don't and even if you cut have the line items where you have 600
employee positions zeroed out, you do not have the political will to pull the trigger. So it's not gonna happen. It was that was what you were supposed to do last year. And to this year's or this coming year's budget is gonna be worse than the buzz budget deficit for this year. And now you're using partial tax reserve money to shore up your reserve for economic uncertainty. That's like taking a cash advance from your credit cards to have,
a a reserve that you know that you are going to blow this year, which means that you have to pay that back. You've doubled the, financial negative impact to this district. What you what we have to do now is the chief business officer officer must present to this board a cash flow analysis between now and all the way to June 30 and what it's going to look like. But because when she does that, it's gonna show you do not have enough cash at the end of this fiscal
year unless you use and blow, partial tax dollars and other restricted funds. And there will be legal action against this board and administration if that happens. There's clear statutory language that protects those dollars, and it is the height of incompetence for you to go down this road. And legal counsel here in the district should examine that and and take a hard look and be prepared for legal action. You need to prepare for a state loan now to prepare for the legislation,
to identify the amount that will buy this district time to be able to to have a year or to to this recent. You make all these cuts even that's being proposed in option one and option two, it's gonna have impact, and and people are just gonna be flailing, in the coming year if you adopt all these things. There are some things that you you have to adopt, but you're not gonna get to a 100. It's time to stop. We everybody is being codependent here. Thank you.
You you're trying to Get on it. Do not destroy more of this district because that is exactly what is happening. We have she Sheila Haines. Sheila Haines. Sheila Haines, if you can unmute yourself to speak. Keep on speaking, Sheila Haines. Yes. We can hear you. Yes. Oh, thank you. Yeah. You know, I'm just, I'm really worried that it's gotten to this point that things are being thrown out here at the last minute. I I don't really know what the answer is, but I do know that first and foremost, our kids have to be safe. I appreciate the comments made about restorative justice and helping with violence prevention.
It could start with the mandate, specifically with the ban on hate speech. That doesn't cost any money. I've been asking and fighting for the reinforcement of love for over a decade now. And thank you, superintendent, for being the first to even start the conversations With recent events happening at the schools throughout the city and in the world, not only does our children need the reminder of daily reinforcement of love and respect, but so does our adults. I was also troubled to learn most recently that violence is even happening in the after school programs where black students in special education are even being suspended from the
after school program. This should not be. Children are supposed to be safe after school hours. It also stood out when seeing slide 18 along with the you guys indicating that 7,000,000 would be taken from NNH to go back into the reserves. I just I don't know about that, but I I pray that there's an overflow of resources available still for these students in the adult program because too many students are learning online and have been for years, with my son being one of them. And the adult school program is their last hope to try and get better.
So I just ask you, I urge you to please do all you can to avoid a stake takeover. It's the harm that will be caused if you don't cut the needed resources. Please, just cut from sources that won't further cause harm to our students. And please stand for no hate speech for our use, along with no more cuts to arts and music education. Because as a reminder, you've already cut a million in that education as well. There has to be time for you guys to, come together, and that time is now. And please do all you can to avoid the state receivership. Thank you.
We have Mark Tafoya. If you're still here, and would like to speak, please, step up to the podium. Mark Tafoya. Okay. Thank you so much. Public speakers, chip chip Thank you. Chair. K. We'll take one round, and then we'll take a second round if you need one. Director Simmons? Director Smith? Well, I just wanted to start off by saying there is a lot to say about our financial problems in OUSD, and I may not feel all the way up to my best ability sharing my concerns because of how our board currently operates. And this is a very important conversation.
I need you guys to be very transparent, not just with each other, but with our, families and our staff members that are here. A couple of things that kinda popped up to me throughout this entire presentation was that, yes, there needs to be no cuts to student services or positions that directly affect our student academics. There needs to be literacy tutors and case workers and TSA commit. These are people that make up our school communities and 100 affect our students every day. Going back to some of the public comment I heard,
yeah, we made a central office, and that central office isn't of use to our students. We spent millions of dollars. I don't know how much we spent on that, but we spent a large amount of our budget on this central office, and students don't even get to go. I'm one of the students that have the privilege to attend because I'm an all city council union member, and we're one of the very few student groups that get to attend and go to that building. But that's not of use to our students. It's not helping our student academics. We have a lot of positions on our district or Organizational chart that are either up for grabs and there needs to be hiring in
that position, or they're just positions that just do not align with our student success rates. So I just want you guys to take that into close consideration when you're considering whatever you need to whatever you need to cut. Just make sure that they're not anything that has anything to do with student services. Doctor. Hutchinson. Thank you. You know, I I'm not sure whether I need to scream or if the tears are gonna start flowing. It's unacceptable that we're in this situation. Just unacceptable. And it represents a complete failure across the board.
Just a complete failure across the board. And I don't want to address some of the numbers that people threw out and all of that stuff. There's one set of numbers and we know what they are. It was only five months ago, less than five months ago, that we finally left receivership after twenty two years. Because we had done the hard work and everyone else across the state, all of our overlords, signed off on the fact that we finally knew what we were doing. But I think tonight again shows, how the bottom has fallen out. I don't know why we sat here and listened to an hour and a half
presentation reading through a PowerPoint about how the resolution doesn't get us anywhere near the number that we need to reach. I would have much preferred staff to stand up and the superintendent to stand up and tell the Board, Your resolution won't do it. But here's what we can look at to maybe get there. All of a sudden, talk about this year and that we're still overspending every day has been dropped out of the conversation. We haven't even stopped the bleeding yet for this year. Every updated set of numbers show worse and worse numbers. So how can we talk about addressing a deficit for next year when we haven't
even stopped the bleeding for this year? Now the only way that we're not going to be able to get through this is if the superintendent uses her unilateral authority and creates a plan that could possibly get us there And puts that before the board. This is crazy talk to think that let's amend it now and come back in two weeks and all of a sudden magically we'll have the right answer. And let's be clear, this amendment that was just thrown out here at the end, after everything, isn't an amendment. This is clarifying language that was already there,
which actually the board was told a month ago they should have done. We had a plan on the books. We had the three R's, which had three components: restructuring the district, re envisioning our footprint, and transformational school redesign. Which are all the things that people mention today. But this board didn't take any votes in June and has refused to take up that resolution that was passed by this board fourteen months ago. This is unacceptable, you all. I need everyone to realize the real crisis that we're in here. There is no easy answer,
and it should be clear to everyone. This isn't staff. Staff doesn't have fiduciary responsibility. This is the school board. And until the school board changes, ain't nothing else on a change. The clock is ticking. If we can't pass a balanced budget for next year and we have to take a loan from the state, we're in receivership. People wanna call what's going on now austerity measures? I guarantee you, if we take a loan from the state, they're gonna enforce every austerity measure. Because they're just they're not gonna let us take twenty years to pay it back. The state's bankrupt too. They will force us to pay every penny of this back as quickly as possible,
which means they will institute $50.60, $80,000,000 in cuts, and we'll have no say over it. Thank you, Deborah. Last point, we've known since June about this budget, and the updates have gotten worse and worse. Here we are in mid November, and this board has still done nothing to develop a workable plan. Everyone needs to get involved and we need to hold everyone to a much higher standard. Because if we don't save us, ain't nobody going to save us. Thank you. Director Thompson? Yes. Thank you very much,
President. First of all, I want to appreciate the report, albeit it was quite long. But I want to appreciate the report. And I just wanna call recall, I want everyone, I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence, but I think, individuals might have thought that reduction on, slide number six meant something different. Am I correct in assuming that is the reduction in the department itself? That's exactly. So, I hope no one misconstrued what was happening there with the with the with that,
nomenclature. So that I I accept that. The other thing I want to stress is that I am the liaison to the g one committee, for the board. And, we talk about things being student centered. I do want us to keep in mind that g one and also measure n and measure h, they are actually student centered necessarily because that deal exactly with what's happening at the school sites for kids. So as we talk about making the cuts,
which we have to do, making the cuts, let's keep in mind that if we refocus our attention and my own verbiage now, let's not deal with the ancillary things, but deal with the things that are more focused, that allow us to actually run the district as it should, which are the parenthetic student centered ideas. So if we have those approaches that will drive our thinking, we will be able to make the correct cuts.
Like I said, a long time ago, it's almost like peeling an onion, and we all might have to cry because of it. But as we make the cuts, guess what? We wanna keep in mind our students. We wanna keep in mind academics. Because, again, and you guys have heard me say this many times, being a person of color, I had no idea what a to g requirements were. I just took classes. And as a result, I was allowed to enter UC Davis, with my academics because they were so high. But I had no idea what a to g is.
Think about our students today. We have to make sure that all of our students are exposed to a to g requirements so that they will have the opportunity to make the, I call, constructive choices to either be academically prowess at, or community prowess, or if they wanna do something in the military or wherever. We wanna make sure they have options. So as we make these cuts, let's keep in mind, and there are gonna be cuts, let's keep in mind we wanna make cuts that don't take away from our kids.
We want our kids to have the opportunity that we adults have had. And my last thing, and I'm gonna shut up. The three r's, yes. I'm gonna put myself out there. I voted for them. I voted for them for a reason. Because if we wanted to protect this district, we had to do something that perhaps would require us to make a bold stance on something. I was ready to make that bold stance, and, of course, we did not go through with it. Ladies and gentlemen,
it's time for us to take a bold stance. It's time for us to realize that it might hurt. Yes. We might have to cry, but we have to get it done. Director Law. Yeah. I think I, I want to, I think, first acknowledge that in we have all known that we needed to hit about a $100,000,000 in budget reductions. And I know that I speak for not just myself and my colleagues and the community here and online that it is hard and disappointing to not have seen proposals
that get us to a 100,000,000 now. But there is a clear understanding that that's where we need to go, and I wanna acknowledge that this is the the amount of staff work that went into these proposals, I just want to appreciate because this work is really hard. The unraveling of our practices and culture over decades is the work This is hard to do in a year. Right? Ideally, we would have done it over a decade, but we don't have that anymore. So I just want to balance those two truths that we are not at a
$100,000,000 right now. But I do believe we still have a path to get there, and I do think that we I just again, I think we have the not just the, you know, board, but this community and the staff who can get us there. And I would just echo, you know, as a a parent of three kids in the district, other what other parents have shared with us in comments and in emails is that we just we know that the other alternative, which is which is going back into receivership, is worse for our kids. We fail our kids.
We fail our community if we do that. So to that end, a few things I know we're gonna do a second round, so I'll keep my specifics for the second round is, focusing on moving forward. That I do think we need to, one, focus on any items or ideas or proposals that move us towards long term stability. I do think we're at a point where we're trying to get through the year, but that we should in a world in which we could do many things, we should prioritize the things that get us towards a more stable school system.
The second thing is that we also need to be real that we don't have we are running out of time. I we I think there's a there's a timeline that's in here and a timeline that the superintendent has and her staff have provided, and I would also encourage us to focus on items that we can implement in our current timeline. I'll save, my specific thoughts, and suggestions for the next round. Thank you. I I wanna thank the community for coming out. Really wanted to make sure we hear your voice. Really wanted to hear, your ideas as well. Very valid and,
very true. And I think, as we continue to move as a community school district, your input, is very helpful for us to hear as we're moving forward. I I'm just I've been saying kind of this refrain for the last couple weeks, and, I tell folks well, let me just put it this way. There's this concept in America that we have a short memory. We have a short memory of events that happened in the past. We don't really hold on to it because we live for today.
And the same thing is for our district here. Right? In a sense that while we're under state takeover, we continue to run up the debt. Let me say that again. While we're under state takeover, previous boards ran up the debt. And I would let me give you an example. In March 2025, this board cut a $100,000,000. In March 2025, we cut a 100. How is that possible? You've been in state takeover for twenty years,
and when Ford comes in, we have to cut a 100,000,000? Stop. Something's wrong with that picture because you can blame the people here, but we have inherited. We inherited this problem. Let's get it straight. It upsets me that folks are providing distortion and misinformation and blaming folks for stuff that was done years ago. Kick the can down the road. We caught the can. The can lies with us, and we have to make decisions now. So we are the board that will make the decisions,
and, yes, it will be painful. But let's get the story straight. Let's get it right. Let's get it right. A 100,000,000 in March, and now you want another 100,000,000 in December? That's $200,000,000. No school district can do $200,000,000. Let's stop the games. You're asking for $200,000,000 in one year? Who has been misspending money and over over over over buying contracts for years and years.
That's the problem here. But, you know, it's people, oh, you're pointing fingers. You're point no. It is a mismanagement of our budget. It is a mismanagement of our budget. You come in in January and you gotta cut 200,000,000 or your or your district goes back into insolvency. Nobody's talking about that. And that hurt it just makes me so upset because that's the numbers do not lie. The numbers do not lie. Come June, we get out of state receivership in June.
You celebrate for one day, and then you get a notice that you gotta cut another $100,000,000. That's a setup, man. That's a setup. Don't fall for the setup. There's bigger things that are going on. And if our board and our superintendent and our CBO and our folks did not see this coming, That's a problem. Because if I had a billion dollar business and my accountant lost $200,000,000, you done. Point blank. In any business, my accountant lose money,
You done. So let's really talk about what's really going on. You telling me none of the boards saw this saw this budget calamity happening? Do I have to let you know? Me say I don't think we I saw it. I saw it. Yes. I saw the budget director. Director Bachelet, did you have comments? Thank you. I do also wanna echo my board colleagues in thanking the community for being here, being on Zoom, as well as our students. I know I saw our, all student council here as well and I would have loved to hear from them.
But again, we are in the late hours of the evening, so I won't, continue, too much. But I also wanna appreciate staff, especially the senior leadership team. I know those were hard slides to put together and tough choices that you all had to make. But I commend you in making those choices and at least giving us some options and scenarios that we could be looking at and be considering as we move forward with the budget adjustments that we need to make. Again, and I also appreciate, community just really reminding us of our values, reminding us of, like, what is truly important in our district,
and hearing from, not only our principals, but our students and staff and families, through e comments as well as, in person, comments at different meetings. I just wanna remind everyone that even, though we do want to partner as much as we can as a school board, we do have the Brown Act that we have to abide by. So that does mean that board members, not up to three board members cannot, or more than three board members, cannot collaborate on something, and that also means especially folks that are on similar committees. And And so that's why it's been difficult at times,
to present things that are vetted by the full board ahead of time because that's actually breaking the Brown Act. So with that, that's why Director Brohart and I got together to put some of these proposals together and so, I'm sorry, to make some of these amendments that you see here tonight, and, again, move forward with some of the recommendations from the ad hoc task force that we heard from, the last time, that we met as a board as well as, again, just adding that last language. And I just want to read it again into the record. Be it further resolved that the district directs the superintendent or designee to present the
board on December 10 its considerations and possible adoption of budget scenarios and recommendations without restrictions that will result in balanced budget for the fiscal year twenty five-twenty six and twenty six-twenty seven. That does give, again, the superintendent and staff some more options to be able to provide to us so that we can, again, ensure that we are able to balance the budget. But I want us to I want our community to really think about not buying into the doom loop,
that we are doomed as a district, that we must go into receivership, that we cannot handle our own business. We must persevere over that and we must work together. So, again, I appreciate staff putting this information together. I'm gonna appreciate staff some more in adding to their work over the holiday break and bringing some more recommendations to us on December 3 and December 10 that really, again, show that we as a board, as a district, as staff, are working together to support our students and make sure that we have local control
of our schools. Thank you. I wanna echo echo what Vice President Batchelor said. Again, I really do appreciate the work of the staff. I know it was a big task to do in a short period of time, but I think even more importantly, it was a bigger task to begin to change the culture of how we spend our money and how we organize ourselves. And I think, the conversations, I think, the work that came out, the presentations tonight, I think show a start to doing that for all of us. And again, the resolutions that we, or the amendments, I'm sorry, that we did submit were vetted.
We did talk with, general counsel, we did talk with, senior leadership to, to present these tonight. I also want to really appreciate Doctor. Aguilera. I think at our teaching and learning committee meeting where it became obvious that we were both thinking very differently and interpreting very differently, I think the conversation that ensued after that meeting was also really helpful, I think, in clarifying. And I think if there's one thing, that I hope comes out of this process for the board and, the district leadership is that we do communicate and that we do where there are
differences, we're able to have those conversations. Again, I think that, you know, we hear over and over again that it was only $21,000,000 but I think, again, it was only one piece of the resolution, and I think it's probably the hardest piece of the resolution, so I appreciate that, that the, staffing was, was the first thing that you tackled. I think the intent of the, amendments, was to and again, I think general counsel sent out an email to all of us saying if you had amendments, please get them to her by today at noon, and we got them to her,
yesterday. So, appreciating that work as well. I think not just bringing stuff up that that nobody has looked at, so I appreciate again the work of of the general counsel in helping us clarify these. But, you know, I think we do have a long ways to go and we have a short time, And, I think that, again, we don't have a choice. We have to make this work. And, again, I I also wanna appreciate, you know, the the work that, the the comments and stuff that that people in the community at the sites from the unions, people have made different comments about this and and helped clarify that thinking our thinking.
So, again, I think this is a collaborative effort, and I hope that we can move forward in doing that, well. Thank you. I know there was a call for a second round of comments. I'm gonna ask this time if we can really stick to the, three minutes, just, in the interest of time we still have a closed session. You stated at the start there'd be two rounds. Thank you. So let's just be, like, it's really hard sometimes, but I think this, for anyone paying attention, you've seen tonight what the issues are and where the problems really lie. So let's just be clear, staff was directed to bring back two scenarios based on the whole resolution to be
presented today. This wasn't a piece of the resolution or the first step. This was supposed to be the whole scenario. But this board was also told on October 8 that that resolution would not be able to find the savings that we need to find. And so here we show up today, and again, it's the same thing all over again. So of course all of these cuts are going to hurt. And the hurt is a lot more now because the projected deficit for next year has grown to set from 75,000,000 to well over a $100,000,000
in just the last four months, because we're still overspending every month. If you listen to the amendment, all of these items have been assigned to the teaching and learning committee, not the budget and finance committee. That should also tell you something there. And the reason why is because currently I'm the chair of the budget and finance committee, and that's what's going on. We have people on the board that think they know better and they want to control this. We also have a timeline that we're operating under. Even though I don't believe that the county superintendent is ever going to be willing
to do her job that she's required to do under the California education code, She told us by the November we have to approve a scenario, finding the full savings by November 30. We've just ignored that tonight. And she said by December 15, we have to have an implementation plan. The county superintendent in that letter also said, We cannot negotiate a new contract with any of our labor partners, unless we make additional trade offs to pay for it. So even if we find a way to cut the 100,000,000 for next year, that still leaves us $0 to negotiate with our labor partners.
It's insulting when people sit here and act like everyone else is lying except for them. No matter how hard they pound on the dais, it doesn't make what they're saying true. We're in a situation now that is the worst crisis I've ever seen in OUSD. And looking around the room, I haven't been here quite as long as some of the people in the room, but I've been here a long time. We've never seen anything like this before. And the clock has already almost run out. So unless we have a plan of shared sacrifice where everyone's gonna sit together and figure out a way through this,
there is no other way. And again tonight, we didn't move closer to a solution, we moved farther away. And people refuse to take this seriously, and it is heartbreaking. I introduced the three R's resolution, got it passed, we didn't do it. I introduced an alternative budget resolution that could have found 15,000,000 for this year, and 100,000,000 for next year. Nobody wanted to do it. So if this board was serious, we could reconsider those resolutions. Thank you very much, Tom. But now, last point, now in this meeting in November 19, for the board to sit here and say,
oh Oh now superintendent go make a plan for us in two weeks. I've never seen anything like this before. I'm gonna be writing a book one day, but we all deserve better, and I need the community to help me in demanding better. Thank you. Judge Thompson. Yes. I'll make this very, very short, and to the point. I really take my job seriously being on the board. I take the fact that I am the liaison to g one very, very seriously. I take the fact that those who have worked so hard with measure n,
I'm sorry, measure h well, n too, but the new one measure h, I take that very seriously. And so what I want to do is to go on record as stating that I am going to do all I can in order to make sure that we, preserve the monies for, g one and also for measure h. Thank you. Judge Trelawn. Yes. So, as I said, I have a couple of specific things I've, areas that I, would hope that the current or even the amended resolution would still,
that is enough kind of guidance for staff that we don't need to amend it further. But the first is, I know that there is, in the slides, there's a plan for on December 3 for an update to come about possible, contract, and outsourcing reductions for this year and the current years. And so, again, I think there is a lot within, our services and contracts. And I just would, again, just reiterate whatever we can start on this year that's the easiest in a not very easy thing, but, you know, easier to implement, that also gets us closer to,
I think, the recommendations and the priorities that were within that committee. I also do think, to the point of doing less with less, is that whatever we can do to reduce the complexity of the district, I think miss Grant Dawson has said it on multiple occasions and I that we have 77 different ways of doing things. That is actually not unique to having 77 school sites. That's unique to how we have, really created a level of independence and autonomy that is in direct conflict with efficiency and
academic coherence, and I would hope that we would identify solutions that get us closer to having efficiency and academic coherence. I think some of that might in fact be, a change in current work patterns or potentially, you know, new, you know, kind of adjustments of how people do their work. For example, we've talked about having somebody who is doing job descriptions again, within the talent department. Some of that might be within finance or procurement, and I appreciate that procurement was left, as is given the priorities laid out. I think that we should also,
regressively welcome in, expand, early learning hubs. We have already had experience with those being successful. You know, again, like, as a person who recently was knocking on lots of doors, in Oakland, parents of all income levels want their children in transitional kindergarten and there's opportunities for us to use our facilities more fully, and including, in existing school sites to help build space in the places where we have higher demand. That is good for students, it's good for our families, and it's also good, for our district.
And then, and then I also I think, this is something that's come up periodically around having a non public school in the district. I know this is something that CAC has talked about. I see you know, Carol Delton, that within our facilities master plan and hopefully within our current proposals that we bring something that moves to finding a site for a non public school. And, I will leave it at that. Thank you. Judge Williams. Thank you. I'm gonna make this short to kind of balance my time from the first round. So, you know, what what we have here is a problem that was identified in 2020.
The super the Alameda County superintendent sent a letter and said you need to cut $220,000,000. It's it's on record. It it there's a receipt of that. And she gave us went from a positive to a qualified, and qualified the next year, and qualified the next year, and qualified the next year. The Alameda County superintendent qualified this expanding budget over the last five years. That's the paper receipts I have.
That was district, you need to do something, but I'm a give you a pass. I'm a give you a pass. I'm a give you a pass. And then in December 2024, the board self negatively certified. That was the red flag right there. Red flag. And then the super Alameda County superintendent came in and then told the board what they needed to do. This is what you need to do to actually stay out of receivership. So I I say this because
the bread crumbs are there. The receipts are there year after year after year, and nothing has been done. That's been significant enough. And now it's been passed on to us to take care of. That's why I'm saying we inherit this. That's why I'm really upset because nobody wants to admit it. Nobody wants to come clean and say, yes. That is actually the facts. I have the papers. You have the papers. She sent the email out to everybody. The receipts are there, but not one person will say, yes,
that's right. And what and and that's the problem with our board here. Nobody's willing to speak on truth of what really is going on. What I hear is, oh, that was in the past. You need to do something today. That's true. But do you learn from your mistakes in the past? Do you learn from not paying attention? That's what I'm talking about. We could do better as a district. We have a culture that does not utilize best practices. We have a culture in our district that does not utilize best practices.
So we need to pivot very fast. We need freeze contracts. We need to freeze serve we need to really go deep and down in there if you're really ready to move some stuff. Let's have these honest conversations so we can move forward. Thank you. Thank you, President Breaux Hart. I just have two, additional questions outside of what I mentioned. Miss Lisa Grant Dawson, if you wouldn't mind. There was a public comment about, the, about cash. In your opinion, would we run out of cash this year? So not my opinion,
but my calculations that I've shared with the district that we've shared with the district. So we wouldn't run out of cash, this year, but, by next year, at some point in time, without some additional revenue enhancement. Yes. So, the reference to that would be the district's unaudited actuals, which reflect that. And as we're coming up on first interim, that is where we share that updated information. Thank you. And speaking about the unaudited actuals, I I, grabbed, was it page 27 of that, and it looks like there's $118,000,000
in the balance of the unaudited actuals for the general fund restricted balances. Where is that money currently budgeted in our current budget? So the unaudited actuals was the completion of the 02/2425 budget. Mhmm. So we started the year with 118,000,000, but we had a deficit. So we used over half of it, which is why we started the year with 55,000,000. And so that is what we also shared in 2425 when we adopted the budget that we burned down a portion of that fund balance also.
So we've been burning out our fund balance by, now to be, like, in thirds, essentially. So, basically, we're projected to not have a fund balance at the beginning of 2627 based on our spending. And so lastly, just to add that we've also pointed out that that fund balance since I've been here, I pointed out that the fund balance should be paid for out of the base. We have other resources that are covering that, which again is what's inappropriate. Thank you. And this last question is for the superintendent. So will your team be able to will you and your team be able to prepare and present,
the information that is in our amended resolution to be able to vote on by December 10? And if not, what would be another date that you'd be able to provide us with the full, recommendation in this amendment? I need to meet with staff tomorrow to review this and, we'll be able to give you an update as quickly as possible. Thank you. That's it. Yes. I just quickly wanted oh, just a clarifying question. Oh. Yeah. So with the previous round of this resolution, we did, have some questions and want to,
wanna share that, we anticipate we may need to send the board some clarifying questions, and then, you know, that would also come back as question and answer. But with the last clause that was added, I don't have it in front of me. So, as it relates to no restrictions, how does that impact the restrictions above? Thank you so much, director Latta. So where it says, be it further resolved, the board directs superintendent designate to present to the board on December 10, which is the question you're asking, and possible adoption consideration budget scenarios recommendations without restriction that will result in a balanced
budget for fiscal years, '25, '26, '26, '27. So is that is another way of saying that, is it a third scenario? So it doesn't have to be answered now if we're we're not clear, but that is the question. Does it reduce, the previously commented, restrictions and direction. Madam President, as the author, if you wanted to clarify, as I read it, like, Miss Grant Dawson would say, it sounds like a third scenario, but for you to clarify as the author. It it would be a third scenario if the the, superintendent were allowed to bring in other,
cuts, adjustments, proposals. Thank you. And point of clarification while we're clarifying, I just know the County Superintendent's letter charged us with approving a scenario by November 30. And the way this is written, we're not going to have a vote until December 3. Again, explicitly disregarding what the County Superintendent said in a November 1 letter. Is that correct? That's correct and we'll be taking that up later. I wanna we that's correct. We're not dis we we actually have talked, about that date. No.
We haven't had talks with her. So are you saying that privately you've been negotiating something with the county superintendent? Because as a board we haven't had that conversation. I have not met with or talked to the county superintendent. Okay, so we are just disregarding that deadline that she set for us. You can think what you want. I do want to address one other thing. Excuse me. I do want to address the issue of teaching and learning and why that last budget that, part of the resolution was placed in teaching and learning. And actually, excuse me, over the past two years, I think that the teaching and learning committee has been trying to take this issue
up of where the programs that we fund, we've had different people come in and talk to us about expenditures within different departments, so I think this is something that I know, as the chair, last year, I began to work with that with Doctor. Aguilera and we have attempted to continue that work this year. So, that's why that that item was placed in teaching and learning. I'd like to call a question, please. On the roll call to on the roll call, to There's a clarifying question from, some of the staff members. There's a new
clarifying information in the Yeah. In the revolution about contracting with other agencies for certain areas of work. And the question came through as to whether the board would be interested in, having the county come and share that information. Comments on that one. I I have a comment. When is that supposed to happen? And this is what happens when you do last minute amendments that haven't been vetted. So when we just set a deadline for this coming back on December 3, when is anyone coming back to do anything before then?
As one of the authors of, the amendments, I believe that this would be a conversation with from staff with that office and then that information from that conversation be brought to us and be presented to us either on December 3 or December 10 so that we can fully have that information. Again, as someone who attended, Elise Castro's, like, beginning of the school year, School Board Association conversation, there were many programs and services that the county provides school districts, and getting that information and getting that cost out so that it can alleviate if
we wanted to switch over to some of those services that could alleviate the general fund, that's some of the savings that we would like to see. So again, that's to be super clear, that's a conversation that staff would have with the county superintendent. If that in that conversation it makes more sense for the county superintendent and or their staff to attend the December 3 meeting to provide us with that information and the costing, that is up to staff and the superintendent to, identify. But theoretically they would bring back that information, provide us with those cost savings, and then again that would be part of either a scenario or,
an item that we'd be able to vote on whether or not we want to move forward. So that means again on December 3 we're gonna be hearing information for the first time and the resolution is gonna be created on the dais again so there is gonna be no work done ahead of time, no way for anything to be vetted and we're gonna continue this pattern of creating unworkable resolutions that nobody's even seen ahead of time. This is a crisis and it is a complete failure. I'm so embarrassed. Can we call the question please, Mr. Reister? Yes. On the motion as stated, so the directors are absent.
Director Latta? Yes. Director Williams? Yes, sir. Director Hutchinson? No. Director Berry is absent. Director Thompson? No. Vice President Bachelor? Yes. President Brothard? Yes. Motion stopped. Thank you. And with that meeting oh, what? Closed session. Oh, yeah. We're going to closed session. But this part is, the open session Oh, wait. Can I make one announcement about the PSAC meeting tomorrow night? I just, because I know that there's a lot of people who are, on this meeting and, the parent student advisory committee for the LCAP is having a a rescheduled meeting for
tomorrow night to discuss the what? I just got this. Excuse me there. PSAC members in the audience are very excited. Okay. So just, we'll time, but it's not on the agenda. The yeah. So the the time, it's tomorrow from 05:30 to 08:30 on Zoom. The links are online, and it's gonna be to clarifying the budget scenarios from from tonight's meeting and then perspectives about the budget scenario so that PSAC members can represent them during the budget development process. So thanks for all their work. Okay. We will now go into closed session. I know.
I know. Doing public comment on on closed session. I did. Is there any is there any public comment on closed session items? Going? Okay. Go ahead. We have public comment on not Hello. Jack Nelson again. Skyline High nineteen seventy two. All are invited December 8 to Skyline. That's you too, Mike. You're you're a titan like me. We're gonna have the John Beam alumni classic, and I think we're gonna raise a lot of money because I'm out hoofing around Montclair already, and I'm gonna be going all the way to San Leandro.
We gotta get some money back. We we lost some money on our buses and, due to the shooting. And it went well today, by the way. Skyline and Tech won, respectively, cross country titles. But I hope you show up, and, there's a 71 year old man that's gonna play in the game, and he might be me. Thank you. If there's no public comment on closed session items Okay. I I I actually have a public comment on closed session items. So first of all, I I found it very, public friendly to have the meeting at a time certain,
and I appreciate you having the public comment afterwards. I would like to see in futurepubliccom in future meetings that you meet at the time certain, and if you need to go back, you come to public session at a time certain. And if you need to go back into closed session, that you do that, other school boards do that. And I think that would, be more friendly to to the public. The second thing is I know that you are discussing contracts in and and labor
negotiations in your closed session. That's what's on the agenda. Things are tossed around such as the two paychecks a month, two payrolls a month for some of the bargaining units. I encourage you that when those items come up, the health insurance and so so on, that if you wanna put it in negotiation as a point that won't impact students and that won't even necessarily, impact the quality of life of staff, then I suggest that you put a dollar figure on it,
and and look at it as one of the items that you could potentially move forward with this year. Thank you. Firstly, before we we do have another speaker, mister Cross. Mr. Cross, are you in the room or online? If you can raise your hand. President Breauxhall, that concludes public speaker for closed session items. Thank you. We will now adjourn to closed session. Okay. We're ready. Okay. We are back in session. Mister Ricksar, can we have a roll call to establish quorum, please? Quite a week. Yes. Yes, madam president. On the roll call to establish a quorum after closed session,
student directors are absent. There's no director Hutchinson is also absent. Director, Lauder? Present. Director Williams? Present, sir. Director, director Thompson? Present. Director, Bachelor? Here. I mean, Vice President Basler. And President Breauxhall? Here. Warren President. Thank you. In closed session, we discussed item. Labor Matters D-one hundred and twenty five-eighteen sixty four, Conference with Labor Negotiators. The Board gave direction. And we're going to adjourn tonight in memory of John Beam. And with that, we are adjourned.