Due to the economic downturn, the State has cut a total of $50 million in funding to ACSD over the past 5 years. We have been able to survive those years through a combination of employee concessions, budget cuts, and use of one-time money such as federal stimulus and spending down our reserve savings. Please refer to the chart for a graphic representation of the gap between income (blue line) and expenditures (red line). Even with eight furlough days and increasing class size by two students for this year (from 28 to 30 students per class), our expenditures are projected to exceed revenue by $5.8 million. This spending gap is expected to grow to $9.9 million for 2013-14 and $13 million for 2014-15. While we are expecting to end this year with an undesignated reserve of $8.5M, we are still short $1.5 million even after depleting our reserves for next year. If we take no action over the next two years, we will have a budget shortfall of $14.7 million.

We need your help with ideas to address our $14.7 million budget gap over the next two years. You may have heard or read about the Governor’s finance reform proposal called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). If the Governor’s proposal is adopted as proposed, our budget gap would be fixed. However, the Governor had proposed something very similar last year called the Weighted Student Funding Formula and we would not be in the predicament that we are in today had it passed. While we are hopeful that the Governor’s proposal is adopted as proposed this year, we cannot risk the security of our student’s education by building a budget based on the hope that LCFF will be enacted as proposed.

All suggestions submitted during the input period are being reviewed and evaluated.  We will maintain and post a running list of ideas here. For more details on our financial situation, please refer to the Second Interim presentation here.