Mission

My mission is to enlighten Stakeholders

and to level the playing field for them by providing them

a new comprehensive, accurate, and undeniable perspective

of each of the State's school districts' individual and collective financial positions,

so Stakeholders can meaningfully participate in the annual budget process

and can be better stewards of the precious taxpayer dollars

meant to educate our precious students.

The individual district financial data herein is from the Department of Education and is not new: The numbers originate from each district's end of year Unaudited Actuals Report that is presented by their administration to their school board every September. The Report is due to the district's respective County Office of Education by October 1st of each year. The County Offices send the Reports to the Deaprtment of Education who then posts the data on their Ed-data website late spring (usually after the typical negotiation season has ended).

What is new is the way each district's data has been assembled: The fresh format compares more than a decade's worth of actual annual General Fund revenues, expenditures and ending balancesto the actual annual revenues, expenditures and ending balances of the all the Governmental Funds.

Once Stakeholders adpot the new global view, they quickly understand:

most district funds are not part of the Budget;
the other funds are being managed outside the Budget process;
dollars are often transfered out of the General Fund to the other funds in order to "comply" with General Fund reserve caps;
any General Fund dollars that were "assigned", "committed", and "designated" to any fund are not truly "restricted" but are flexible;
districts "deficit budget" much more often than they actually "deficit spend";
deficit spending within the budget is not always a bad thing;
deficit spending outside the budget is always dangerous;
besides reserves, districts also have a variety of other safety-nets:kept COLA, ADA cushions, State Emergency Funds,...;
common sense best practices like right-sizing, spending restricted money first, spending assigned money within a couple of years, and passing COLA along to employees within a reassonable amount of time are often ignored;
most district's Governmental Funds balance has at least doubled, and in many cases has tripled, what it was just ten years ago when the Local Control Funding Formula came into play; but
despite the system's design flaws, they can still be savy stewards for the students.

As it stands now, the vast majority of Stakeholders, including most school board members, are in the dark.