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After months of discussing cuts and reductions to a budget that was negatively certified since the beginning of this year, the Pleasanton Unified School District Board of Trustees received some good news last week about next year’s financial outlook.
According to assistant superintendent of business services Ahmad Sheikholeslami, not only is PUSD’s 2026-27 annual budget projected to be positively certified, but it is so much of a significant turnaround compared to last fiscal year that it could set the district up for a stronger financial future.
“The district has had a structural deficit and has been eating away at its unrestricted reserves, to a point where there are no more reserves,” Sheikholeslami said during the June 11 board meeting. “Now we are able to — with this budget and the future — rebuild our reserves (and) get us to a place where our finances are much more stable.”
Every June, PUSD’s school board votes on adopting the annual budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Staff present the annual budget, like they did last week, so that the board can review and discuss the details before coming back and formally adopting the budget — that vote will come at the next board meeting June 25.
Sheikholeslami recognized that building the district’s budget every year requires the hard work and dedication of every department across the district to balance their numbers. He also noted how, due to the district’s past negative certification with the county, PUSD was able to get the help from Kate Lane, a fiscal adviser on behalf of the county.
Lane worked with the county’s fiscal crisis management and assistance team (FCMAT) to conduct a fiscal health risk analysis.
Through their work with Lane, Sheikholeslami said the upcoming budget shows a lot of positive aspects, one of which being how PUSD is projected to meet the state’s minimum reserve requirement for the 2026-27 fiscal year and the following two fiscal years.
“So much has changed in this budget,” Lane said. “I feel that the budget before you … is a far more resilient budget.”
He said thanks to the over $11 million budget cuts and reductions that the board approved earlier this year as well as new revenue from the state, the district’s unappropriated ending fund balance went from negative $2.46 million in 2025-26 to a positive $489,000 in 2026-27.Â
He said the new budget also projects a growing reserve balance with about $2 million of new ongoing funding, which he said could be used for a variety of things including restoring positions that were cut during the recent budget reduction cycle, or setting funds aside to support increased compensation.
In addition, Sheikholeslami said the district’s unrestricted net deficit/surplus is projected to go from a negative almost $4.78 million to a positive $44,200. That unrestricted net deficit is also projected to go up to over $2.5 million the next fiscal year and just under $2 million in the 2028-29 fiscal year.
These increases show PUSD reserves going up to over $7.5 million in total this coming fiscal year and over $10 million the next two fiscal years.
“It is great to see that we are going to be back in positive,” Trustee Charlie Jones said. “I cannot stress that enough.”
Jones noted how, just a few months ago, there was a real fear of the district possibly having to make further reductions, but now the conversations shifted to potentially restoring positions of putting new money into other areas.
“This is a much better place to be than where we were just six months ago,” Jones said.
Sheikholeslami added that the district has been able to strengthen the budget by removing a lot of one-time revenue sources that were part of the prior budget and replacing them with ongoing revenues, which he said was huge for the development of the 2026-27 budget.
“The adjustments that we made are significant,” Sheikholeslami said. “It builds both this structural resilience and improvement in the budget and it addresses a lot of the concerns and items that were raised by the FCMAT study.”
With almost $11.7 million in new one-time money on the horizon from a Student Support and Professional Development Discretionary Block Grant on the restricted revenue side, PUSD is also considering backfilling its negative ending fund balance from the 2025-26 budget and setting some of that money aside for other restricted expenditures — that money is still dependent on the state budget being adopted.
However, Sheikholeslami said that rising costs including salaries, health benefits and operational overhead have “neutralized some of the gains that we’ve seen and it limits our ability and our capacity to restore and/or provide increased compensation”.
Sheikholeslami said because PUSD is experiencing declining enrollment, its revenues are also decreasing, which means that even though the district is getting a 4% increase in funding from the state’s funding formula, it doesn’t translate into an equivalent amount for PUSD. According to Sheikholeslami, this will pretty much guarantee further staffing reductions over the next two fiscal years in order to match the appropriate number of staff to students.
When Board President Kelly Mokashi asked what the amount of reductions would look like the next fiscal year, Sheikholeslami said PUSD is projecting to reduce staff by 8 FTE in 2027-28 and 5 FTE in 2028-29. FTE refers to the number of hours for each staff positions — 1 FTE reflects a full-time position while 0.5 FTE refers to a part-time position.
“When you’re declining enrollment, you have to make adjustments to your staffing,” Sheikholeslami said. “You’re getting less money, because you have less students … We’ve been doing this almost every year.”
Mokashi ended the discussion by reminding her fellow trustees about the fiscal responsibility they have to the community to think about PUSD’s long-term fiscal health and how it will address some of its recent budgetary challenges.
“I do think we need to continue to demonstrate to our constituents, our students and our families that we are fiscally solvent so that we can get, potentially, a parcel tax down the road or some other additional funding,” Mokashi said.
