Second in a series
Re “With Eye on Re-election, Paspalis Reflects on Last Four Years”
[img]1805|right|Ms. Kathy Paspalis||no_popup[/img]Six months after Prop. 30, Gov. Brown’s promised panacea for starving schools, scored a convincing victory on Election Day, the wait for a heaven-sent gift continues.
The flood of fresh funding has more closely resembled a trickle.
“All Prop. 30 does,” says School Board President Kathy Paspalis, “is stop the deferrals we were having. In other words, say, we have a budget of $50 million coming from Sacramento. They said, ‘Here is your $50 million, but we only are going to give you $25 million now. The other $25 million, you can have that in 12 months.’
“We operate on a cash basis. They tell us we can put $50 million on our books right now so that they don’t have school districts all over the state filing for bankruptcy. But we don’t get half the money until later.”
As she launched her re-election campaign for a second term on the School Board, Ms. Paspalis and her four colleagues have been forced to scramble, with bridge loans and similar strategies.
“Districts all over the state have had to be creative.
“What Prop. 30 did was just give us all of that money back, which was great because we needed it. But it did not restore any money, under Prop.98, that had been cut in the last five years,” said the attorney. “That is the push right there.”
Ms. Paspalis said it is “a great relief to the School District to know that we are going to get the monies that have been deferred while we have been trying to figure out how to make ends meet with money on paper instead of money in the bank.”
Confronted by towering challenges, such as the much-anticipated capital improvement projects and deferred maintenance, “we are trying to address those issues now.”
As a second-time candidate, does Ms. Paspalis bring as much energy and enthusiasm to her re-election campaign as she did four years ago as a rookie politician?
“I bring more enthusiasm because I know what I am doing now. The first year, you just want to kind of listen and learn. Then you jump in.”
Never called bashful on the dais, “I have jumped in with two feet in areas where I have background or some expertise,” Ms. Paspalis said.
Has she surprised herself by discovering that she knew more about certain school-related topics than she thought?
“I know I am a pretty smart cookie. So I am not surprised. I learn quickly, and we get a lot of professional journals, and I read them. What I don’t know, I have been learning. I am not going to do something half way,” Ms. Paspalis said.
(To be continued)
