Short-Changed by State, School Districts Borrow and Students Lose

by Stephen Frank on 09/19/2011

Proliferate spending by unions and union controlled school boards has caused teachers to be fired, maintenance to be delayed and needed equipment put on hold.

“But in San Diego, where Stover now works as deputy superintendent of business at San Diego Unified School District, getting short-changed by the state has become a way of life.

For years now, the state has been getting further and further behind on its payments of tax revenues to schools. Faced with a constant shortfall in cash, Sacramento has steadily increased the amount it has to write in IOUs to school districts and is constantly behind by several months in delivering cash to schools.

What started in 2002 as a one-week delay in getting about $2 billion out to districts has now ballooned into a $10 billion problem statewide.

San Diego Unified alone is currently owed about $70 million. Other smaller local school districts like Grossmont Union High School District and San Marcos Unified are owed tens of millions of dollars apiece — equivalent to around 30 percent of those districts’ entire budgets.”