State Fiscal Woes and Local School Funding Crisis Take Center Stage at Rep’s Meeting

• Cities May Have to Help Schools More

BY SUZANNE GULDIMANN

The dire straits of the California budget was in the spotlight, when California Assemblymember Julia Brownley, who represents Malibu and Santa Monica, and is the chair of the Assembly Education Committee and a former Santa-Monica-Malibu Unified School District board member, spoke recently at Edison Elementary School in Santa Monica.
“We are going to have to make some very deep cuts,” cautioned Brownley. The recent ballot initiatives “offered something for everyone to hate. I wasn’t proud of them,” she said. “Understandably, people are really angry.”
Brownley said that the message that came to Sacramento in the wake of the massively unpopular special election was that “The voters want legislators to find a solution. The governor wants ‘cuts only.’ We’re wrestling with his cuts only [plan]. We also have a cash problem. It’s true we’re going to run out of cash in June.”
“[California State Controller] John Chiang is asking the legislature to come up with a credible budget by June 15,” Brownley said, adding that while Chiang’s date may be unrealistic, a budget by the end of June may still be within reach.
Brownley is also optimistic that an initiative to change the two-thirds super-majority vote requirement for the state’s annual budget to a simple majority rule may appear on the ballot as soon as 2010. She does not, however, see the two-thirds majority rule governing tax increases changing any time soon, although she stated that Proposition 13, which imposed the super-majority rule and limited property tax increases in 1978, is now “less of a holy grail,” and that there are efforts being made to “nibble around the edges” of the law.
“If the legislature makes all of the cuts California will be the only state that has eliminated its health and safety net,” Brownley said. She blasted plans to close parks—seven of the over 200 state parks slated for closure are in her district—and Schwarzenegger’s continuing push for offshore oil drilling leases, for what she described as “very short-term gains.” Brownley also condemned the governor’s proposals to strip money from schools, transportation, and higher education, and eliminating many welfare programs, calling the plans draconian.
Brownley described education as arguably the “civil rights issue of today,” and added that California now ranks 50th “in every important [education] indicator.” She called the situation intolerable. A major part of the problem is the bewildering complexity of the current education funding system, which Brownley described as “convoluted, complicated, and cobbled together.”
“In my opinion, [the system] has lost track of students completely. It’s become a cottage industry in Sacramento. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District does an extraordinary job, but as a board member I took it at staff’s word. I had to depend on the chief financial officer. It should be simple [and] make sense—so simple we could all understand it.”
Although cities in California expect to experience their own cuts in state funding, they nevertheless may be asked to contribute more to public school districts that serve their residents.
At the start of the event, NPR commentator Sandra Tsing Loh, screened a short film called ‘Burning Mom” about her 2008 “Children’s Rally” in Sacramento to protest education cuts, and the whole California education funding system that she described as a “huge, weird, Willy Wonka-like Rube Goldberg machine.”
Brownley told the audience that she is attempting to simplify that system with AB 8, which will, according to the language in the bill, “Simplify the formulas for allocating funding to each local agency,” and includes “rational and equitable allocation of funding to each local educational agency,” as well as “predictability and stability of funding,” and “support for accountability by providing transparency of state revenue allocation rules as well as expenditure decisions at the local level.”
The bill is currently wending its way through the legislative process. Brownley said that it has received a “positive response” from the governor’s office. Asked by an audience member what parents and community members can do to help, Brownley replied that letters and e-blasts are effective tools. “I’m a believer,” she said, suggesting that pressure needs to be placed not on the legislators who are already on board, but on the ones who she says are holding the process up. “They should be squirming,” she said. “But they don’t squirm easily.”