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Improvements in the Pleasanton school district’s 2026-27 annual budget allowed the Board of Trustees to restore several staff positions last Thursday, which were previously identified to be cut during budget discussions earlier this year.
Following the board’s approval of next year’s budget, trustees voted unanimously to reinstate elementary school physical education specialists and elementary school science specialists who, due to state funding limitations, will only focus on teaching computer science.
The board also voted 3-2 to restore some high school counselors and elementary school intervention specialists — despite some concerns raised by two trustees and district staff.
“Finances are tight,” assistant superintendent of business services Ahmad Sheikholeslami said during the June 25 board meeting.Â
“We built a better budget but the pressures on future compensation are going to be significant and we need to be forward thinking,” Sheikholeslami added. “If we don’t do that, we’re going to be in a very difficult position in the months to come, in the years to come.”
During the 2025-26 school year, PUSD had been undergoing a contentious budget development process where trustees — after dozens of public meetings and discussions with staff and community members — identified over $11 million in budget cuts and reductions.
According to the district, these budget reductions were among several other actions the district took in order to address its ongoing structural deficit and related budget shortfalls that had caused its 2025-26 budget to be negatively certified by the county.
As part of its budget reduction efforts, the board maintained that it had kept most of the cuts away from the classrooms. However, back in February, trustees were forced to approve a layoff plan that totaled over $5 million in cuts that directly impacted staff and students.
At the time, staff said these cuts were part of a contingency plan in case certain funding wasn’t realized or if labor negotiations over some of the items identified in the $11 million worth of cuts were not realized.
Since then, the district was able to cancel a handful of layoff notices in April that were previously sent out as part of those budget cuts. Some of the positions included social workers, district parent liaisons, child welfare and attendance specialists, elementary library media assistants, and elementary reading intervention support specialists.
Additionally, the district has since completed the development of its 2026-27 budget, which shows some significant improvements from the prior budget. The trustees approved that budget during the June 25 meeting — after having reviewed and discussed it last month — before discussing reinstating the staff positions.
According to Sheikholeslami, not only is the new annual budget projected to meet the state required 3% minimum reserve for this year and the two upcoming years, but it also shows a significant improvement in the district’s unappropriated ending fund balance, which moved from being over $2 million in the negatives, to just under $500,000.
He also went over anticipated increases in state funding, which the district said is approximately $2 million in new ongoing revenue and $11.7 million in one-time funding.
“We are in a good place, given both the state budget and the deliberate work that the board did under reductions,” Sheikholeslami said. “It’s the combination of the reduction work that the board did combined with the significant new dollars that provides us this unique opportunity to stabilize our finances moving forward.”
But despite these and other budgetary assumptions, which again included the overall idea that the district’s budget would be positively certified later this year, staff argued that the district should not have made any changes to the original reduction plan to avoid further structural deficits.
Their reasoning was similar to Board President Kelly Mokashi’s thoughts share during the meeting that the district isn’t quite out of the woods yet when it comes to its financial challenges, even with the additional funding.
Her biggest contention was that the district has been deficit spending since she first got elected to the board and she wants the district to get to a point where they don’t need to come back next year and make more cuts.
Trustee Justin Brown, when it came to voting on reinstating the counselor and intervention specialists later in the meeting, also said that although he appreciates those positions and did not want to vote against reinstating them, the current open contract negotiations with the teachers union made him a bit hesitant about spending additional money.
The board ultimately unanimously approved the reinstatement of 4.2 full-time equivalent (FTE) elementary physical education specialists and 2.8 FTE elementary school science specialists.
The trustees also discussed the cuts to the elementary music program, but they decided to not reinstate any positions for it because staff said the district is able to maintain the program’s status quo with less staff due to low enrollment.
While there was a lot of debate and discussion that night over the financial details of the budget and the impacts of reinstating positions, the main point that the board was split on was reinstating high school counselors (2 FTE) and elementary school intervention specialists (2.5 FTE).
Brown and Mokashi voted against the move because they were concerned about the financial impact reinstating those ongoing expenditures would have on the district’s budget.
“I’m really struggling from the standpoint of we are not out of the woods and we’re challenged with downward enrollment and fiscal responsibility, stewardship, and also it is no secret we will have to go back to the community for a parcel tax,” Mokashi said. “So it needs to be very, very prudent for us as a board to think about, not just tonight, but how we’re handling these fiscal decisions.”
The rest of the board voted in favor of reinstating these positions, which was met by applause from many members of the community in attendance that night including educators and parents.
The board also unanimously voted to approve the allocation of those $11.7 million in one-time funding to address the district’s negative ending fund balance.
The board voted to use that money for other things like increasing the unrestricted reserve to 5%; setting aside funds for curriculum and book adoptions; and providing a one-year gap funding to restore health service assistant (HSA) positions, which the board previously agreed to cut as part of its 2026-27 budget reduction plan.
This one-year funding, according to staff, will give the district time to look for other ongoing funding options.
