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After more than 12 hours of listening to the pleas of stakeholders, weighing out direct impacts to students and compromises, the Pleasanton Unified School District Board of Trustees agreed last week to direct staff to prepare a resolution that will propose approximately $6.3 million in budget cuts for the 2025-26 school year.
The board also finalized a list of proposed reductions across all departments, however, the majority of those reductions will be in district-wide services and administrative positions as members of the board made it a priority to keep the cuts as far away from classrooms as possible.
“There’s a lot of time and effort — and sweat and tears — put into these recommendations,” Board President Justin Brown said during the Jan. 30 board meeting. “They’ve been thought through from a professional perspective.”
Over the past school year, PUSD has been discussing its financial challenges that staff have attributed to declining student enrollment, rising operational costs and the end of one-time pandemic relief funds.
“To maintain valued programs over the past four school years, the district used its reserves (savings) and one-time funds to pay its expenditures, which resulted in deficit spending,” according to the Jan. 30 staff report. “PUSD’s unrestricted reserves are now projected to be below the required 3% at the end of this fiscal year (2024/25).”
Staff have said in order to remain fiscally solvent, the district needs to make reductions to its budget and find new forms of revenue.
The district previously made about $8.1 million in reductions and other budget adjustments for the current 2024-25 fiscal year back in spring 2024. However, that was not enough, which is why the district formed a Budget Advisory Committee in May to help with this next year’s reduction planning process.
That committee spent six months developing revenue and reduction options — and assessing the different impacts of those reductions — which were presented to the board during the Jan. 16 board meeting.
At that meeting several students, faculty and community members urged the board to not go through with certain reductions such as eliminating the elementary music program and the A/B Period for 6th and 7th Grades. A local change.org petition for those two specific reduction options gained over 1,100 signatures to save both programs.
Since Jan. 16, the board has held two workshops to discuss the various reduction options. At their first workshop, the board established a consensus-driven criteria for making these budget cuts, which prioritized impact on students and their classroom experience while also maintaining the district’s legally compliant services — such as human resources.
Previously, staff said that in order to ensure the district’s financial stability during the next fiscal year and also maintain its required 3% reserve in the budget, PUSD will need to make a minimum reduction of about $5.56 million in 2025-26 and another $200,000 the next fiscal year.
However, during the Jan. 30 meeting the board provided further direction for staff to now prepare a resolution for about $6.3 million in proposed reductions for the 2025-26 school year.
“These reductions are necessary for the district to maintain fiscal stability and more adjustments are expected to be required for 2026-2027 to fully address our qualified budget status with the Alameda County Board of Education,” Interim Superintendent Maurice Ghysels said in a district-wide statement on Feb. 4.
The list of proposed reductions — which will allow the district to hit that $6.3 million reduction target — was a result of over 12 hours of regular and special meetings which ended with several members of the board and members of the public in attendance feeling tired of having to make all these tough decisions.
Evan Branning, president of the Association of Pleasanton Teachers, was one of those recurring public commenters throughout the various board meetings and on Thursday, he said that while he appreciated the board’s commitment to making these difficult decisions, the cuts that the board have already made up until now have already impacted teachers throughout the district.
“The morale is low,” Branning said.
Branning, along with many other public speakers throughout the month, challenged the board to think about how many of the proposed cuts would affect students. Over the last couple meetings in January, technology specialists, reading specialists and other classified employees highlighted just how important their jobs were to keep the entire district running smoothly.
Pleasanton’s California School Employees Association President Laura Martinez said during the Jan. 30 meeting that classified employees were like threads holding the district together and Ghysels followed up on that point later in the meeting saying that he would like PUSD’s new permanent superintendent to be able to take over a district where those threads of people who hold crucial knowledge are still there.
That’s why many of the trustees focused the discussion last week on looking at ways to cut days from management and higher administration positions given the fact that those positions are not under union contracts.
“One of our jobs as a trustee is to push … (I’m) doing my due diligence for us to exhaust all options for our budget cuts,” Board Vice President Kelly Mokashi said.
Other items discussed during the meeting were the board’s unanimous stance against cutting more custodian positions and technology specialists — a lot of the specialist positions that the district originally were vying to cut were off-limits for the board. The board opposed cutting more custodians and in the end, only one custodian position will be cut in order to save just over $100,000.
Another major talking point was the number of vice principals being reduced across elementary and middle schools.
According to the recently published list of proposed reductions, there will be a reduction of 1.6 FTE for elementary vice principals and 1.4 FTE for middle school vice principals. One FTE — which is an acronym for full-time equivalent — means an employee works the same number of hours as a full-time employee.
While the majority of the board said they were against the reductions — Trustee Mary Jo Carreon recalled a time when PUSD had part-time elementary vice principals and how that burdened teachers — they agreed to the reductions as long as none of the high school vice principal positions were touched.
According to the list of proposed reductions, one of the reductions that will generate the most savings will be a reduction in special education consulting services — it is estimated to save $500,000. The district will plan to recruit and hire in-house staff for those services instead.
At a higher level, the executive cabinet will see one-time savings by reducing the number of work days by three days and reducing the number of work days for the extended cabinet by two days. Combined, however, that only makes up just over $50,000 in savings.
The cuts that will generate hundreds of thousands in savings will be in coordinator positions for fiscal services, technology, human resources, student services and special education — all of those positions have been vacant. Other administrative secretary and classified positions were also listed out to be cut.
Another major area where the district will look to save money is in summer school. According to the list, the district will eliminate summer school for grades one through five and will instead offer students with “Expanded Learning Opportunities” options. That cut will save the district $300,000.
Following last week’s meeting, staff will return to the board next Thursday (Feb. 13) to present an initial resolution for a reduction in force in order to “fulfill the statutory required layoff notification to staff by March 15, 2025.”
At the same time, district staff will also work on developing the 2025-26 budget, additional fiscal information and any other factors that could affect the budget.
The final reduction in force resolution will be brought back to the board for approval in May, final layoff notices will be issued before May 15 and the new 2025-26 budget will be finalized and brought to the board in June.
