Montebello Unified School District in California had a student walkout in protest of budget cuts. My first thought was, “Just another excuse to miss school”…but curiosity caught hold and down the gopher hole (I know, usually rabbit, but gopher holes seem to be pretty convoluted and so, seems an appropriate substitute).
Looks like these kids may be on to something. I pulled up the budget for 2016-2017 and the salary data available for the most recent year (2015) and what I found was more than frightening. Let’s get out of the way that I think teachers deserve to be paid well…when they do a good job…like any other career.
Montebello USD has 30 schools and about 27,000 students. The total budget for this year was $347 million. Factoring in for adult education ($20 million), means that there is a budget of about $12K per child student.
$285 million goes to salaries and benefits. 82% of all the educational funding for the Montebello USD goes to salaries and benefits. Add $14 million for *consulting* (read as: Hire my friend at his rate, not the district pay scale) and $10 million for, mmmm…my favorite category, Other. How is there an other? These are our tax dollars (and if you have ever read a city or school district budget, they make it as hard as possible to figure things out) but we should know where every penny goes. Other? Unacceptable…
Well, at least with such a well paid group of instructors and administrators, the schools should be stellar, yes? No…not one of their STAR test averages is above 50…and they are 10-15 percentage points lower across the board than the state average. No wonder the students are angry. The schools are failing them and now they have impending budget cuts.
I have an idea…if you need to cut $15 million next year (and they do)…how about you cut $14 million off the top by eliminating consultants? Then take $1 million out of “other” and you have yourself a budget. How can this be so difficult? No teachers get fired or take pay cuts, and the students don’t lose any more from their minimal supply budget. Plus…this frees you up to dump another $9 million from “other” the next year.
You know what struck me while investigating all of this is that this isn’t out of the ordinary. Most school districts spend 80-85% of their entire budget on salaries and benefits. How can those salaries take that much of the funding? I thought you’d never ask (even if you didn’t, I was going to tell you…)
The Montebello district of thirty (30) schools has the following: CFO (whose pay I just earned by solving his budget crisis), CIO, CBO, Controller, Superintendent, Deputy Superintendent, (3) Assistant Superintendents, (20) Directors, (5) Assistant Directors, (5) Senior Accountants, (6) Accountants, (12) Account Technicians, Senior Executive Assistant, (21) Executive Assistants, (102) Senior Office Assistants, (34) Psychologists and…there are even (11) High School Assistant Principals….for 4 high schools.
What does all of this bureaucracy cost? For just the positions listed above…$15.5 million dollars. LAUSD has 10 Superintendent positions…Montebello has 5. LAUSD has 1100 schools and 640,000 students…Montebello has 30 and 27,000. Starting to see the issue here?
The Montebello USD CFO was paid $282K in 2015. The LAUSD CFO…$280K. You are telling me that the Montebello Chief Financial Officer has the same workload and responsibility as the LAUSD CFO?
(3) Irrigation Technicians make over $70K annually…each. Irrigation Technicians…
Montebello USD has 37 Program Specialists…whatever they are…that cost them $4.7 million dollars annually. 6 people have the title of “Special Payments” and they cost $376K per year.
Montebello USD is 21 square miles. Yet they spend $5 million a year on the bus drivers and supervisors. By comparison, Simi Valley USD is 88 square miles (also has 30 schools) and spends $1.5 million.
For this next part, I must reiterate that I truly believe that teaching is one of the most important jobs in this country and I want the good ones to be paid accordingly. For reference, the average teacher salary in CA is $84K for long time teachers (or those with advanced degrees) and $45K for those just starting out.
Montebello has 223 teachers that earn more than $125K annually. Simi Valley has 5…yes, 5. Montebello USD has 27,000 students and Simi has 18,000, yet Montebello’s budget is $347 million and Simi Valley is $161 million. Montebello spends 2.2X the dollars for the same number of properties and only 1.5X more students annually.
Why? That bureaucracy we talked about above. Simi Valley USD has no COO, CFO, C anything O…they have a superintendent and 3 assistants. They have 12 accountants to Montebello’s 23. In all…the bureaucracy spend listed at Montebello for $15.5 million equates to approximately $6 million at SVUSD.
Simi Valley has no (ZERO) Teachers on Special Assignment. Montebello has 48 of them, at a cost to the district of $5.4 million. Simi Valley has half the psychologists at a third the cost. They have no program specialists…whatever they are…costing them that $4.7 million. Simi has $4 million in consulting (compared to the previously noted $14 million) and the dreaded “Other” category? $600K…not the zero dollars I hoped to see…but far less than the $10 million of Montebello.
So, Simi spends less money proportionally…do the students suffer? Those same tests where Montebello was well under average…Simi is 6-11% over average in all the categories. Now, I am not a huge (damn the fact that I can’t use the word huge without now saying it in my head as yuuuge) proponent of standardized testing…I think it forces teachers to teach kids to pass specific tests. So let’s look at another measurement: In 2010, Montebello High received a 20 out of 100 in the statewide school scoring based on student performance. In that same year, Simi Valley High was scored at a 71. There are other ratings and other numbers, but they tell the same story. For all of this money they spend on high priced executives and such, they consistently range in the bottom of school rankings in the state.
It isn’t all bad news for Montebello USD. The Superintendent and CFO were fired in December, the board president called for an audit in response to the numerous calls and complaints from employees regarding fraud and improprieties, and it looks like the proper attention is being drawn to the problems within.
But, I found it eye opening to dig into these budgets. LCFF (California’s newly implemented method for assigning dollars to districts) provides $276 million to Montebello USD and only $137 million to Simi Valley. Federal funds on top of that are $27 million to Montebello and $5.5 million to Simi. The state of California provides an additional $28 million to Montebello while providing Simi with $8.6 million. So, how does Montebello get $331 million from fed and state where Simi gets $151 million?
I read about the LCFF which says it now favors equity and transparency over complexity when determining school funding. Hmmm…so Simi receiving half of the funding for two-thirds the student head count is equity? It turns out that this equity is really a formula that says: Take the average daily attendance of the district and that is your base grant. Now..you get add-ons for things like number of kids in K-3 and disadvantaged youth. You get a big bonus if you have more than 55% disadvantaged youth.
OK. So, factoring in all of that information, Montebello gets twice the money as Simi Valley. Even if you agree that we need to spend double the money in the disadvantaged areas, should we be spending it on salaries for executives and administrators?
I can’t see how spending $30 million of those dollars on executives and consultants is helping those children. If you are going to assign extra dollars to a district based on disadvantaged youth, shouldn’t there be some accountability to where those dollars would be best spent?
Should you really be telling the band parents (in a city with a median household income of $48,273) that they need to come up with $6,000 to replace stolen equipment, when you can pay $282K to one executive? Money needs to be there for the kids…not the executive level…or their pet projects.
Oh no…we need our programs for smoking prevention, drug prevention, crime prevention, healthy eating awareness, gang prevention…DO we? Anyone know the success rate for DARE? No…because once the real numbers came in, no one wanted you to know that all that money and time wasn’t merely a waste…it was counterproductive. What? Yes…multiple studies showed that high school students exposed to the DARE program had a higher instance of drug use than students who hadn’t been through the program. Significantly higher in usage of hallucinogenics.
How about we leave the child raising to the parents and use the funds we do have for education and educational materials. When I hear that you can’t afford new drum sticks or science materials for the students, you better not tell me that you have $120K lying (see…my public school education taught me the difference between lay and lie) around for an analyst to measure the effectiveness of the education being received in the district.
I just did it for free…it isn’t very good. Now give that $120K to the arts, sciences, and vocational studies please.
Note: As I was about to post this, it was released that the Montebello USD board voted to layoff 235 teachers, but only 9 administrators. So, to reach that budget requirement, they didn’t cut consultants or high priced executives…or “Other”, they cut the people directly interacting with the children on a day-to-day basis.
“Hey kids! We know the schools are here solely to educate you, but….we need to cut money out of the budget. You must understand that we can’t cut the executives. Teachers have to go. Yes….that will cause you to have fewer class choices and may make it harder to learn and finish school…but the CEO has to keep his summer cottage! Thanks for being so cool with all this.”
Above the Nonsense 