$100 MILLION in Lost Funding for PV Schools

If I told you that our school district missed out on over one hundred million dollars of funding from the state, you’d be pretty upset, right? Well, thanks to something called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), that’s exactly what happened.

What is the LCFF?

There is a long history of how the school funding system evolved in California. Local taxes used to be the sole source of funding, which resulted in huge differences in quality between districts. Wealthy communities had much nicer schools and more money available for teachers, while poor communities did not. The LCFF was the last in a series of regulation changes meant to correct that inequity. It sent local taxes up to the state level along with state taxes and distributed that money to the districts. But the problem is that the pendulum swung too far in the other direction—the method of distributing funding for schools became unequal on the other side.

There is a complex formula that determines how much money each district gets: it is primarily based on a metric called “Average Daily Attendance” ADA, which calculates how many students attend the district correcting for absences (side note: make sure your kids don’t skip school! It literally affects how much money we get!). If that was the only factor, the result would be relatively equal and fair. Districts would get funded based on the number of children that attend schools there. But unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

The LCFF places extra emphasis on factors such as how many kids are English-as-a-second-language, or in foster care, or receive free lunches from California. As a result, the per-student funding rate drastically varies by district. As a local example (see data here), in the 2023-2024 school year, PVPUSD received funding at a rate of $11,574 per student, while just down the hill in LAUSD, they received funding at a rate of $16,674 per student—more than a $5,000 per student difference! To put that into real terms, if we had received that amount of funding, we would have received an additional 52 million dollars this school year. Think about that.

I did the math going back five years to 2019. If California had used a more fair and equal system, providing funding for each student at the same level, we would have received over 100 million dollars more than we actually received.

So what can we do?

The good news is: other school districts are already taking legal action against the state of California to change the LCFF system. The bad news is: one of the major legal actors is trying to make the LCFF even more unequal. The demand letter recommends that California “employ a sliding scale of State support inversely proportional to local wealth.” If California were to adopt the new system that is being proposed, our district would likely receive even less than we receive now.

Our district needs to take action NOW. We need to immediately look into making our own legal demand to California to equalize the funding rate for all students. If I am elected to the school board, I will make it a top priority to begin this process immediately.

How can I help?

1) Let the current board know how you feel about this! Email them. Call them. Show up to board meetings. Make your voice heard!

2) Help me get the word out. Tell your friends about this. Share my website link. And if you can, donate to my campaign to help me spread the word!