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The Pleasanton Unified School District Board of Trustees recently completed its monthslong budget cut process.
At its Nov. 20 special meeting, the board agreed to reduce the district’s certificated substitute pay rates by $25, which is projected to save the district about $125,000, bringing the total number of savings identified by the board to just under its target goal of $11.2 million.
“This is something that’s actionable and doesn’t directly impact our staff,” Board President Justin Brown said regarding the substitute pay rate reduction.
The board had also previously approved Nov. 13 just over $7.5 million in initial ongoing reductions that had initially been identified during its Nov. 6 special meeting.
Now that the board has finished identifying approximately $11.16 million in cuts and reductions, staff will begin the process of implementing them as well as meeting with labor union partners regarding the items that are negotiable and that could be rejected by those unions.
Should the unions reject the negotiable items, the board would be forced to reconsider previously rejected cuts, bringing them back to the chopping block.
“Not that I want to create churn in our community and our staffing circles but from a realistic perspective, we may need to discuss those in item three,” Brown said, referring to all of the items the board mostly agreed were not viable to cut due to impacts to students or staff.
In recent months, the board has spent countless hours and hours in special meetings workshopping the list of proposed reductions to the 2026-27 budget. The need to identify these reductions comes from a structural deficit the district has attributed to declining enrollment, expiration of one-time state funds, low state funding and rising costs for compensation, insurance, health care and special education services.
In addition to these financial challenges, the Alameda County Office of Education had also conditionally approved the district’s 2025-26 budget dependent on PUSD making these ongoing expenditure reductions and finding ways to increase revenues in order to net a minimum savings of $8,153,721 in 2026–27 and $737,131 in 2027–28, for a two-year total of about $9 million.
According to staff and district leaders, the target was set at making $11.2 million in cuts in order to keep factors such as continued declining enrollment, a lower cost-of-living adjustment and other funding contingencies in mind.
After much debate and hours of public comments, the board settled on the following cuts: reducing department and site budgets for materials and supplies by 5%; reducing special education consulting services by hiring in-house staff, reducing department travel and conference budgets by 10%; and reducing work years by four days for Superintendent Maurice Ghysels and by three days for district office management, including the executive cabinet. Site management will also have their work years reduced by three days.
The district will also reclassify several administrator positions to save money.
Additional cuts include reducing elementary vice principals; decreasing hours for high school operations coordinators; phasing out the site management non-reimbursable expense stipend; cutting work days and positions for district and site support services; and reductions in operational services, technology, and graphics.
The initial $7.5 million in reductions will also decrease the number of integration specialists, combine some fourth and fifth grade classes due to low enrollment, eliminate the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program, and reduce the budget for several professional development programs.
During their Nov. 13 meeting, the trustees also identified just over $3.5 million in additional reductions, which were approved unanimously during the Nov. 20 meeting.
Those reductions include reclassifying a career technical education director to an assistant director; reducing hours for a technology service director; reducing hours for custodians at both elementary — which will be bearing the brunt of these reductions — and middle schools; and increasing middle school staffing allocation ratios.
Other reductions from the second round of cuts include increasing high school staffing allocation ratios; phasing out hours for a Amador Valley High School library assistant position; and freezing certificated and classified educational degree stipends.
But apart from approving these latest cuts at the Nov. 20 meeting, the board was also poised to vote on including cuts to the reading intervention support specialists.
Staff’s original recommendation was to completely phase out all of the reading intervention specialists but after much debate during the Nov. 13 meeting, the district returned Nov. 20 with an amended recommendation to reduce the RISS positions by half.
However, trustees pointed out that these positions provide too much valuable aid to underserved students.
Trustee Charlie Jones notably reflected on relying on these types of services as a child with dyslexia who needed the extra help.
“I see the value in this position so for me, I would prefer that we do not cut this position … at all especially with how, even with equity, it lines up,” Jones said.
He said with the board’s action on reducing the sub pay rate, he didn’t see a need to include the RISS positions in the budget reductions.
Trustee Laurie Walker, who had been on the fence about the RISS positions, said she was worried about how even with a reduction of half of the RISS positions, there would have been several elementary schools left without that additional aid.
Vice President Kelly Mokashi also added that on top of the board’s desire to keep the RISS positions, she would like to see the district revisit those intervention positions so that they could more effectively support a wider range of students.
Trustee Mary Jo Carreon noted that she was concerned about the negotiable items the board identified for reductions.
She said she wasn’t comfortable with some of the cuts to middle and high school programs because now a majority of the cuts identified must be agreed upon by labor partners and she said she is wary of the possibility of those unions not accepting those reductions.
“These cuts that are on here right now kind of put me over the edge, and I’m afraid,” Carreon said. “I don’t want to make a mistake with our labor partners. I don’t want to make a mistake as a board.”
However, Brown noted that the fact that the board identified a large number of cuts gives labor partners many options to discuss over the next few weeks and have good faith discussions over. He said had the board taken any items off the list of roughly $11.16 million, it would have limited union leaders to fewer options and could have forced the district to identify other cuts.
“There’s no doubt that half the items of this $11 million are items that require negotiation,” Brown said. “And it is entirely possible that, as a board, we will have to reconvene a special meeting in January and go through the items that are right now in the three column if those negotiations fail.”
“But I don’t want to presuppose those negotiations will fail and start putting on positions that the community and the board have said … we need to keep these positions to protect our most vulnerable students,” Brown added.
Upon meeting with labor partners and beginning discussions with unions regarding the negotiable items, district staff plans to return to the board with updates in January.
