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Assistant Superintendent Mike Reynolds
When was the last time anyone associated with the School District made the following observation:
“We are in excellent financial condition.”
Referring to the updated budget report that was presented to the School Board last night, Mike Reynolds, Assistant Superintendent/Business Services, delivered the tasty conclusion before the meeting.
The glum faces that used to haunt District headquarters on Irving Place, more closely resemble the happy expressions of Disneyland these days.
And they have almost from the date of Mr. Reynolds’s arrival, less than five months ago. The consistently up-tempo administrator has sprayed more cheery news across Culver City than the pediatrician for the latest mother of quintuplets.
The Right Attitude
As he has noted in the past, “the District has been very conservative for at least the past several years. We have a good spending plan in place.
“We are working on reducing our deficit even further.”
What has happened to the alarm bells that were sounding last year?
“This did not have anything to do with my arrival,” Mr. Reynolds said. “It has to do with the passage of Prop. 30” by California voters barely a week after he started here. “That prevented severe cuts. Prop.30 did not give us extra money. It just prevented really bad cuts.
“We have analyzed our revenues for this year’s budget, and we think we are going to get a little more than what was originally budgeted.”
Layoffs Are So Yesterday
One of the dreaded dramas that plays out across the state every late winter/early spring is a vicious guessing contest that toys with people’s livelihoods.
It centers around:
Who will be laid off at the end of the school term?
In Culver City in recent times, despite occasionally overstated reactions, hardly anyone has.
One reason is that despite the titillating trumpeting of certain trauma, the governor’s allotment for schools seldom changes much from the January introduction to the May finalization, it seems.
“It does not change a lot for the current year, usually,” Mr. Reynolds said. “In the past, there have been mid-year cuts. But the good news is that there is no reduction in the current year revenue.
“In January, the governor starts talking about the next year, not the current one.
“We are doing two things right now – analyzing the current year’s expenditures and we are starting to put together the 2013-14 budget.”
The fiscal grimness that greeted his hiring was caused by uncertainty over whether Prop. 30 would pass on the first Tuesday in November. “The previous administration had no idea whether the (feared) huge cuts were going to take place,” Mr. Reynolds said.
“If Prop. 30 had failed, we would have had to cut another $3 million from the current year budget. Instead of a $5 million deficit, we have a $2.2 million deficit. We have further identified another $1 million in additional revenue and reductions in expense.”
Down to the last 3½ months of the fiscal year, said Mr. Reynolds, it is easier to be more precise about “your true expenditures and revenues.”
A Harbinger for Teachers?
The relative abundance of fiscal stability is encouraging news for the Teachers Union, whose members are thirsting for raises.
Mr. Reynolds, a key player in bargaining negotiations, said that union President David Mielke “has been kept in the loop” regarding the state of District finances.
“We have told him upfront, during negotiations, that we have three goals:
- “To maintain our 5 percent reserve.
- “To balance our budget. That may not happen this year. We would like it to happen next year. But we are dedicated to balancing our budget.
- “Once we balance our budget, we are dedicated to elevating all of our salary schedules because we are currently among the lowest. That is statewide, countywide, from any perspective, we are in the bottom proportion of salary schedules.”
