State Budget Revisions Mean Status Quo for PUSD

When Gov. Jerry Brown's May budget revisions are discussed at the Piedmont school board meeting Wednesday evening, the message from the district administration will be to stay the course.

In the revisions presented earlier this month, Brown proposed spending $3 billion more on schools in 2011-2012 over the current year. But Piedmont Assistant Superintendent Michael Brady says that doesn't translate to a change in the bottom line as $2.5 billion is money already owed to districts that would have been deferred under the state budget plan presented in March.

"It's good news. It helps with cash-flow," Brady said–the district has at times had to borrow from the seismic safety bond fund for a few days to make payroll while it waited for state money to arrive. "But we're not getting any more money per child."

Brady won't be recommending that the Piedmont school board make any changes to the local budget plan in response to Brown's revisions.

The assistant superintendent says the revisions do let Piedmont teachers and district staff take a small sigh of relief, as the updates improve the likelihood the state will pass a budget by Aug. 15 without additional reductions to education funding that would have triggered a 1.5 percent pay cut under a contingency plan attached to employee bargaining agreements.

The governor's plan reflects better than expected 2010-2011 revenues, but still hinges largely on a set of tax extensions he hopes to get on the ballot in June. If the tax extensions don't pass, "we could be looking at a mid-year [state budget] adjustment," Brady said, which could mean a bigger dip into the Piedmont school district's reserves that would have to be made up in subsequent years.

With , union concessions, and staff reductions, PUSD has what was initially projected to be a through 2013. But as long as state funding levels stay where they are, Brady said the district is looking at exhausting its reserves by 2013-2014.

The governor's revised budget proposal is also a topic for the Thursday meeting of PUSD's Budget Advisory Committee.