Like any seasoned entertainer, Mike Reynolds, the School District’s month-old Assistant Super for Business, knows his audience.
The School Board’s sort of informal Budget Workshop last evening – where members sat at tables in a squared circle, rather than at their horseshoe desk – the audience was dominated by students, who were appearing for class credit.
Instead of delivering a no-nonsense state of the budget report, a glut of enough numbers to drown a colony of dinosaurs, Mr. Reynolds played to his audience.
For an hour, he produced an instructive seminar on organizing and evaluating a school district budget, a skittish undertaking ringed by swirling concentric circles of permanent fiscal uncertainty.
As a father of four, Mr. Reynolds applied an ideally balanced touch to serving both sets of listeners.
While maturely updating Board members on the changing dynamics resulting from the recent victory of Prop. 30, he proceeded at a pace that insured the least sophisticated of the two dozen students could follow comfortably without feeling overwhelmed.
The Booty from 30
Of the $6 billion in revenue that Prop. 30 is expected to yield annually, $2.9 million is expected – a necessarily hedging verb – to accrue to Culver City schools, which, Mr. Reynolds calculated, will blot out three-fifths of the budget deficit the District has been running.
But that won’t become kind of final – he explained that “final” carries a liquid meaning when referring to revenue flowing from Sacramento – until January when Gov. Brown unveils his budget numbers in his state of the state talk.
The Culver City High School students learned that funding a school district is like running up and down a basketball court with sticky stuff on your shoes and both hands. In the dark. While the court is being sprayed with icy water.
They were told that a promise of $2.9 million frequently is different from the package the postman delivers from Sacramento, often less, never more.
They learned that before Prop. 13 passed in 1978, placing an unbreakable ceiling on property taxes, school districts collected their revenue from their hometowns. Once 13 became law, the center of fiscal gravity shifted to the state capital. Funding schools became as unreliable as an unelected government.
Mr. Reynolds told the students that funding for schools primarily is derived from three sources, personal income taxes, corporate taxes and the Dept. of Motor Vehicles taxes, plus several other streams.
Because the economy can resemble a bouncing basketball, there are prosperous years and strapped years for schools, often without predictability. The last five years have been dreadful.
There is no question, Mr. Reynolds said, that Prop. 30 will provide the District with badly needed breathing room for perhaps four years. Certitude cannot exist, however, until the money is in hand.
