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The Pleasanton Unified School District, along with many other districts statewide, celebrated the legislative death of Assembly Bill 1204 during this past session in Sacramento.
The bill, which proposed several changes to the way school districts receive state funding, was widely opposed by educators and district leaders who continue to advocate for better funding mechanisms as they face ongoing budget challenges.
“The decision not to advance AB 1204 does not itself provide new funding to PUSD, but it avoids a change that we believed could have compounded an existing structural funding challenge over time,” PUSD Superintendent Maurice Ghysels said in a statement to the Pleasanton Weekly.
“That is especially meaningful after three challenging budget years, when comparatively low per-student funding, declining enrollment and rising costs contributed to nearly $25 million in budget reductions,” he continued. “We have taken significant steps to strengthen our fiscal position and remain focused on sustaining that progress.”
AB 1204 — authored by Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat who represents most of the southwestern portion of San Diego County — wanted to make various changes to the state’s Local Control Funding Formula.
The LCFF, which was enacted around 2014, established “uniform grade span grants in place of the myriad of previously existing K–12 funding streams, including revenue limits, general purpose block grants, and most state categorical programs,” for school districts and charter schools, according to the California Department of Education.
However, that formula hasn’t always worked in favor of districts like PUSD that, according to Ghysels, are funded in the bottom 10% of school districts across California. He said this means PUSD receives, “less funding per student than nine out of 10 unified school districts in California, while Pleasanton is one of the highest-cost areas in the state”.
“Under California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), districts receive a base level of per-student funding with additional grant funding provided for low-income students, English learners, and foster youth,” he said. “Pleasanton has comparatively fewer students in those categories and therefore receives less of that additional funding.”
This is one of the many reasons PUSD and other school districts across the Tri-Valley and the state joined a coalition called Raise the Base, which calls for legislators to raise the base level of funding for public schools in California.
Part of those advocacy efforts included having district leaders join in opposition against AB 1204.
According to the bill summary, AB 1204 specifically wanted to increase supplemental grant funding and expand concentration grant eligibility; establish a minimum annual LCFF cost-of-living adjustment, along with other future regional cost adjustments; and create a “phased transition towards a revised LCFF funding structure beginning in the 2025-26 fiscal year”.
One of those district leaders who joined others like Ghysels at a June 15 Senate Standing Committee on Appropriations meeting to voice their opposition to the bill was Dianne Jones, president of the Fremont Unified School District.
During the meeting, Jones touched on several issues she and her colleagues had with the bill, including one of the main ones being how Fremont, PUSD and other school districts continue to face budget challenges.
“When LCFF was adopted, only about five school districts were statistically underfunded. Today, that number has grown to more than one third of California school districts serving over 1.2 million students,” Jones said during the committee meeting.
“While we are grateful that Assemblymember Alvarez recognizes the need for LCFF reform and the intent of AB 1204 is to raise public school funding, many of our member districts are opposed to the proposed adjustments to supplemental and concentration grants,” she added. “These adjustments would severely diminish the funds available to raise the base funding levels of all school districts, including those most underfunded and would cause more extreme funding disparities throughout the state.”
Now, almost two years after it was first introduced in February 2025, the state’s Senate Standing Committee on Appropriations decided in August to hold the bill, which means it failed to get sufficient votes to pass out of committee and will not advance in this year’s legislative session, according to a legislative information guide.
According to the district’s Aug. 26 E-Connect newsletter, the move also means that because this was the second year of the bill’s life, it will not move forward in its current form.
For school districts like PUSD, it was seen as a huge win.
“AB 1204 would have increased the share of funding distributed through those additional grants for higher-need students, and our concern was that, over time, this could have widened existing funding disparities and left already underfunded districts like PUSD further behind,” Ghysels said.
“We strongly support additional funding for students with greater needs,” he added. “We believe the more sustainable and equitable approach is to strengthen the LCFF base grant, which increases funding for all students and, under the existing formula, also results in proportionally greater funding for students with higher needs.”
He said that’s why PUSD will continue to work with other school districts as part of the Raise the Base coalition to “advocate for stronger LCFF base funding and a more sustainable and equitable approach to funding California’s public schools”.
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