In the Spring, the Board discussed the Master Facilities Plan and requested an update this fall. Within this update, staff is recommending adoption of the new plan in June 2027. The rationale staff provides is that we have our currently running Strategic Plan and budget adjustment processes, where we’ll be collecting community and stakeholder input for those plans.

Staff determined that deciding our building and facilities footprint would be premature until we’ve aligned on what shape our programs should take. During my Board discussion and comments to staff, I’ve consistently been requesting that all of our processes talk to each other so we keep them pointing in the same direction. This would be another place where we could have misalignment between our plans and our overall goals.

Staff highlights some things that they recommend movement on ahead of the longer-term planning processes: refreshing aging playgrounds and adding science equipment for elementary STEAM rooms. The details will be important, and I’m looking forward to having the discussion.

This is the other side of the facilities plan, our overall demographic trends and enrollment projections at our schools. In short, our enrollment peaked in 2017-18, with a large shock during the pandemic, followed by a gradual increase to a peak this year, and a gentle decline by about 66 students (or 1.4%) out to 2032-33. The soft landing is driven by the competing trends of declining birth rates locally with an increasing fraction of them enrolling in the district.

These projections show us having room district-wide except TK, which is projected to be over capacity in 2032-33. Combining this forecast and our programmatic choices into our facilities plan will allow us to effectively decide what our school district will look like in the future.

Spinning out of our budget alignment discussions, I had asked at a previous meeting to agendize a discussion of our reserves, why we hold them, and what our policies should be. We’ve had to budget to use them this cycle, and the sole guidance our existing Board Policy 3100 provides is to target a 17-20% range in the third year of any budget and to develop a plan to restore them if it falls outside that.

To help understand this, staff describes why reserves are important for a district like ours. Our funding is tied to property tax revenue, and Proposition 13 caps how quickly assessed values will rise, but puts no brakes on decline. With revenue arriving largely in December and April, reserves allow us to continue to make payroll every month without borrowing.

The next question is what the proper number to target is, and staff presents a couple of data points. The state floor is 3%, national guidance is approximately 17% for us, and School Services of California presents 33% as a minimum. The presentation breaks down how we can think about the purposes of our reserves as different components.

One thing to keep at the forefront when we discuss reserves: once we’ve spent it, that money is used up, so if we spend them on ongoing costs, it makes it that much harder to do in the next year. They give us the runway to make the gradual, thoughtful adjustments we’ll need without drastic immediate actions.

Consent is where routine items get approved in a single motion, but it’s worth highlighting two of them that fit within the themes of the previous discussion items and my experience at Crittenden. During roofing work this summer, crews found significant dry rot at Crittenden and at Theuerkauf. A classroom was closed in one case and a pedestrian walkway in the other, and the district brought in a construction firm to address the issue as an emergency.

Balancing keeping our current work going during unforeseen problems while planning for an uncertain future is part of the exciting challenge that the school district faces.