Transition to Basic Aid

By Scott Orlosky

At Issue: Last Spring the Hope School District board decided to change the district funding from Revenue Limit to Basic Aid. This transition to Basic Aid will take several years and eventually result in more dollars per student. Why wait several years to make the transition instead of doing it now?

Under the current Revenue Limit funding the district is free to accept transfers from outside the school district boundaries (inter-district transfers), however under Basic Aid funding it is not (see note below on Funding Sources.) The Hope School District has a large percentage of inter-district transfer students (about one-third) so the transition in funding needs to accommodate these students' needs.

The existing board has made the decision to allow these inter-district transfer students to remain at their respective schools until they graduate, but not to accept any new inter-district transfers. This ensures continuity of curriculum, social interaction and educational resources for these students.

Accelerating this process would require an immediate need to reduce the number of teachers in the district (by roughly a third), closure of classrooms, reallocation of educational resources and be disruptive to neighborhoods and families in the district. Though Basic Aid may look good from the strictly financial perspective, the transition must take into account other factors.

Allowing the change to happen more organically would allow the natural processes of attrition to take place. Teachers and students would be able to finish their tenures as part of a smooth process. It would also give the District enough time to find new ways to use the classroom space, commensurate with the educational mission of the District and maintain public trust with the families of inter-district transfers that originally placed their children in the district to begin with.

Declining Enrollment:

This is an issue statewide + not just in the Hope School district. The "baby-boom" is well past and fewer people are having children and those that do are having fewer children as well. This is further compounded in the state by the fact that the cost of living is very high. In essence, new families with small children don't have the financial resources to move into California's suburban elementary school districts.

District Funding Options:

Revenue Limit means that property taxes from within the district go to the state and are then mixed with similar funds from other Revenue Limit districts throughout the state. The state redistributes these funds to each of the districts based on a distribution formula and the amount of funds distributed is limited by the amount of revenue that the state collects, hence the term "Revenue Limit"

Basic Aid means that property taxes collected within the district stay within the district to fund the schools. A requirement of this funding is that only families that live within the district are allowed to attend the schools in that district.