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The Pleasanton Unified School District Board of Trustees unanimously approved a resolution last Thursday that authorizes staff to borrow up to $15 million from the county treasury in order to make up for state money the district doesn’t have yet, but is set to receive down the line.
Assistant superintendent of business services Ahmad Sheikholeslami said during the Sept. 11 board meeting that while it isn’t uncommon for other school districts to request these types of county loans, PUSD hasn’t done this in the past because it was able to rely on its funding reserves, which are significantly lower this year due to other budget challenges.
Based on PUSD’s general fund beginning balance for the 2025-26 fiscal year and the combination of revenues and expenditures for the first couple of months of the new fiscal year, the district’s month-to-month cash flow is set to go into the negative beginning next month, Sheikholeslami said.
To prevent this from happening, he said for this month the district will be using interfund borrowing from one of its other funds. But from October to November, it needs another funding source in order to stay fiscally solvent.
“In October, we’re going to need to borrow from the county treasury,” Sheikholeslami said. “This is mainly a short-term borrowing for cash flow purposes.”
Every month, the state allocates millions of dollars to PUSD as part of its Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). According to the California Department of Education, LCFF funding is “allocated through the Principal Apportionment and is funded through a combination of local property taxes and state funding”.
According to the district’s cash flow report for the start of the 2025-26 fiscal year, the district will be receiving money through this state funding mechanism every month all the way to February. While the district is set to receive over $3.6 million in state property tax funding in August and September, it will only be receiving just over $51,500 in October and a little over $138,000 in November.
Additionally, even with the state funding, the district’s total disbursements — including salaries, benefits, supplies, services and other finances — are expected to be double the amount of its revenues until December.
For reference, according to the 2025-26 general fund cash flow report, the district’s total receipts in October are expected to be close to $9.92 million while its total expenditures for that month are expected to be around $19.8 million.
Sheikholeslami said by December, the district will be set to receive its first of two state property tax apportionments, which will significantly help level out the overall cash flow. The district is expected to receive close to $38.7 million in state property tax revenue at that time.
According to the approved resolution, the money PUSD borrows from the county “shall be paid back no later than May 1, 2026”.
In a statement to the Weekly on Monday, Board President Justin Brown said the money borrowed from the county will be repaid from “revenues received later in the year”.
The approved resolution was a separate discussion from other budget items during the Sept. 11 meeting, which included a report on the district’s unaudited actuals from the 2024-25 fiscal year, which showed how final expenditures were significantly higher than what staff originally budgeted.
According to Sheikholeslami, the main reason for the significant variance in the unaudited actuals was because salaries and services ended up being higher — an increase of just less than 0.5% — due to staff not accounting for the cost of things such as compensation increases, paying substitute teachers and other services.
“The total variance in salaries from the adopted (budget) to unaudited actuals was about $5.78 million of which $1.3 million can be attributed to the 1% compensation increase, leaving a $4.48 million increase that can be attributed to non-positional costs, reductions through staffing attrition, and moving funds to cover contracted services in special education,” staff wrote in the Sept. 11 unaudited actuals report.
“The district is adding procedures to better track outside staffing accruals to reduce such variances in the future,” Brown told the Weekly on Monday.
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