Funds for needy students bolster some Sonoma County school districts

The school year was over when about half the students in the 1,900-pupil Bellevue Union School District returned for three extra weeks of classes June 1.

Fifth-graders attending the summer program at Taylor Mountain Elementary School in southeast Santa Rosa crafted free-form science experiments out of straws, paper clips and other basic ingredients before heading to lunch, provided at no cost by the district.

“They have a bit of freedom, more so than during the school year,” said student teacher Lauren Orris, looking on as her 13-student class attempted to create flying cars and invent hair accessories. The district’s Summer Learning Academy, a pilot program open to all students, is meant to address the dramatic loss of learning that students - particularly those from low-income families - experience over the summer. To that end, students are spending much more time on reading, a subject where they can lose a lot of ground without practice, than they would in a normal school day.

In the past, paying for such a program, which doesn’t generate average daily attendance dollars to boost the district’s budget, would have been impossible. But thanks to a new state funding mechanism called the Local Control Funding Formula, which dispenses large sums to high-needs districts such as Bellevue, the summer academy is just one of a number of programs proliferating in southeast Santa Rosa.

But while the new funding model has led to dramatic changes for districts like Santa Rosa City Schools and Bellevue Union, districts without those high-needs populations, such as Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified and Petaluma City Schools, have struggled to restore programs cut during the recession.

“The conversation we have now about funding in schools is really different,” said Bellevue Union’s superintendent, Alicia Henderson. “It’s no longer apples to apples. It is now so contextually bound district to the district.”

A new funding formula

Described by the Public Policy Institute of California as the “most significant change to California’s school finance system in decades,” the formula gives school districts flexibility over how they spend their money. It requires them to work with their communities to craft local action plans ensuring they use the funds to meet certain state goals, such as rolling out new curriculum in line with the Common Core State Standards, reducing suspension rates and ensuring students are ready for college.

The formula is part of an effort to restore, by 2021, all school district budgets to 2007-08 levels. That was the last year before the recession led to dramatic budget cuts that required school districts to slice programs that included physical education, summer school and counseling. At the same time, the new formula does away with a system under which districts were given so-called categorical funds, which could only be spent for a specific purpose. Instead, they get a larger base amount of money, alloted per student, to spend as they choose.

“One of the great things about the Local Control Funding Formula is it puts decision-making in the hands of those who know local needs and priorities best. Those are local school board members and their communities,” said Bill Ainsworth, spokesman for the California Department of Education.

Beyond restoring school budgets to pre-recession levels, the new formula provides extra funds to help schools reach underserved students, defined as foster youth, English-language learners and students receiving free and reduced-price lunch.

For each such child, school districts get a supplemental grant equal to an extra 20 percent of the base sum. Then, districts with at least 55 percent disadvantaged students get an additional concentration grant, worth 50 percent of the base sum.

Last summer, districts crafted their first Local Control Accountability Plans, outlining how they would spend this money. A year in, they’re revising those plans and taking stock of how they’ve worked.

Bellevue

The change has been “absolutely a positive” at Bellevue Union School District, Superintendent Henderson said. “The new funding formula acknowledges that districts have different levels of (financial) need based on their populations.”

She pointed out that a district like hers lacks the fundraising power of a wealthier district, where foundations can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to supplement state funds.

In 2012-13, before the new funding model took effect, Bellevue received about $7,500 per student from the state. Now, the district projects it will be receiving about $10,000 in the 2015-16 school year, resulting in a roughly 30 percent increase in state funds.

The result: New programs like the $400,000 Summer Learning Academy, the restoration of physical education classes and the addition of part-time literacy paraprofessionals in every kindergarten through third-grade class to help students get up to speed with reading.

“We’re doing big, bold things in an all-out effort to support every child,” Henderson said. “The new funding model has provided us with the ability to do this.”

Cotati-Rohnert Park

A few miles south of Bellevue’s Kawana Springs Academy, in Rohnert Park and Cotati, the population shifts, and so does the financial reality of the area’s main school district.

Only about 49 percent of students in Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District qualify for extra funds, Superintendent Robert Haley said. That means his schools don’t get the concentration of grant dollars that have been such a boon for Bellevue.

He said his district actually lost money in the first year of the new funding formula. That’s because the district had received a lot of money under certain funds done away with under the new formula, such as one that rewarded districts that reduced class size.

The result was that, in 2013-14,?the first year Local Control funding took effect, the district received about $700 per pupil less than it would have under the old system. It required deficit spending that year to maintain programs and avoid layoffs, Haley said.

This occurred despite the fact that the district’s enrollment was rising as a result of concerted community outreach efforts.

“It was hard for us to add programs,” Haley said. “It was a little frustrating.”

That reality is slowly changing, he said, as the state allots more base dollars to all school districts each year in its effort to restore pre-recession funding.

In the past academic year, he said, his district was finally ahead of where it was before the recession. That has allowed it to begin bringing back positions and programs lost to state budget cuts, he said. The district has expanded counseling services, among other things. “With our enrollment going up and state funding going up,” he said, “we’re restoring things that should have been there all along.”

Petaluma

The Petaluma City Schools district has experienced similar challenges.

“In theory, I totally support it; I think its a great idea” said outgoing Superintendent Steve Bolman of the new system.

“For districts getting large amounts of supplemental and concentration grants, it becomes a huge windfall,” he said. “We’re one of a few hundred in the state that are losers in the formula, I’d say.”

Petaluma City Schools consists of a high school district, where just 36 percent of students qualify for extra funds, and an elementary district, where 44 percent qualify.

While his districts get some extra money for those students, its not enough to make up for other losses.

And while the district overall has fewer needy children, some of its schools have disproportionately high numbers. At McKinley and McDowell elementaries, 88 percent and 98 percent of students, respectively, are foster youth, English learners, or low-income. But the current funding system doesn’t account for the need for those high-needs schools, he said.

“The state is realizing they have a problem because we have that need in the district, but we’re not getting concentration funds,” Bolman said. “It’s something the state will have to address.”

As a result, the district has restored fewer initiatives than Bolman would like. Still, it has managed to pay for some new programs with supplemental grant money: Last year it brought back a summer school program that had been cut early in the recession. This year, it added two staff development days specifically focused on educating teachers about how to better serve needy students.

But there are even more unmet needs, like including purchasing new textbooks in line with the new Common Core standards and reducing class sizes to the levels that existed prior to the recession.

Santa Rosa City Schools

Officials at the county’s largest school district, Santa Rosa City Schools, see the new plan largely as a plus.

Assistant Superintendent Diann Kitamura, who this year helped roll out many programs under the new model, spoke about it with enthusiasm.

“It has provided a great, huge opportunity to be able to truly identify (students who need extra help) and provide services above and beyond what we could have afforded to do in the past,” she said. “The LCAP has really called out the need to provide services for children who are underserved.”

The Local Control Accountability Plan requires numerous meetings with parents, teachers and students to determine where the biggest needs lie and how best to spend the increased funds.

One of those needs in the Santa Rosa district was reducing the high number of suspensions and expulsions - so the district has implemented a systemwide restorative justice program that addresses bad behavior in other ways.

Another was mental health. So this year, the district partnered with nonprofits to provide behavioral health services, including individual and group counseling, at each school site one to three days per week. Officials also plan to set up a college and career hub at each high school, expand after-school tutoring for elementary school students and hire family engagement facilitators to make sure parents, including Spanish speakers, feel included.

Santa Rosa City Schools includes an elementary district that has a high number of underserved children - 78 percent.

The high school district, meanwhile, is slightly below the threshold for additional concentration grant dollars at 50 percent.

However, Kitamura said she didn’t see serving the high school district as more challenging despite having fewer dollars. It makes sense that the state would provide less for that district, given the fact that it has fewer students requiring expensive programs, she said.

“If we’re truly following the model of serving the students who generate the dollars,” she said, “then the services must follow” those dollars.

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jamiehansen.