HUSD To Make Hard Decisions For Cuts
In Which: Massive administrative failures put the District at risk, District to cut $18 million in staff, And Everyone wants the cuts to come from somewhere else.
FCMT Reveals Administrative Failures
At the February 12th HUSD Board of Trustees Meeting, the Fiscal Crisis Management Team (FCMT) made a presentation revealing huge process failures at the District Office. The FCMT analyzed HUSD to avoid a state takeover of the District and conducted 40 interviews and analyzed over 500 documents.
FCMT was created in 1991 by the State Legislature to help school districts avoid “fiscal insolvency” or going broke. The FCMT made clear that, without drastic action by the District, they’d be unable to pay their employees by May of this year. That would force the District to take on a loan from the State, the State would take over management—acting as both Superintendent and Board of Trustees—and the District would be forced to repay that loan with interest, requiring even steeper cuts.
FCMT stressed that they were focused on systems and processes—they didn’t make recommendations about how to balance the budget, but pointed out processes that affect fiscal health. They found, for example, the Payroll, Budget, and Position Control departments didn’t work together, which contributed to the surprise deficit increase we saw late last year. The FCMT recognized that both the Superintendent and Superintendent of Business are new to the district and that these problems had been around for a long time.
Union Engagement and Administrative Failures
Trustee Oquenda asked what would happen to the Collective Bargaining Agreements if the State was forced to take control. The FCMT explained that the State would force an appointee from the Alameda Count Board of Education (ACBOE) to take over and likely renegotiate the Union contracts.
Trustee Oquenda then wondered if closing more schools in 2021 would have helped the budget situation today. The FCMT said that it’s impossible to answer without data, but closures usually don’t save as much money as people think because you only cut the administrators and site-specific staff. Unless you reduce classroom teachers—combining low-enrolled classes—then you may only save around $1,000,000 per year.
Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo asked why it was hard to access information and if there was engagement with labor partners. FCMT said that the District didn’t have documented processes which it difficult to find out what was going on. They said there wasn’t even a simple checklist of what Staff needed to do each year for the budget. They also said they didn’t interact with HEA because they were focused on systems and processes.
This prompted Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo to push back on not including labor in the conversation. The FCMT clarified that they didn’t meet with union leadership but did talk to the union members doing the actual work.
Trustee Prada asked what factors contributed to the low fiscal health rating. The FCMT said that vacancies in key leadership positions at the District Office were an issue. For example, the Chief Business Officer position was vacant for 6 years, causing a lack of oversight. “This is a people business,” they said, “When we don’t have good people, the right people, or even it’s vacant… the process breaks down.”
Trustee Bufete asked about the percentages that contributed to the low fiscal health rating. The FCMT pointed out that, in the list of things they check, the items with a higher percentage—the most important areas that got the most No answers—should be the ones addressed first. For HUSD, those were Internal Controls and Fraud Prevention, Position Control, Fund Balance and Reserve For Economic Uncertainty, Leadership and Stability, and Enrollment and Attendance.
Trustee Prada asked about the role of Special Education on the budget. FCMT said that the issue wasn’t spending, but that spending wasn’t monitored. “You are at the end of the year and you are surprised by an almost $20,000,000 swing driven by Special Ed,” they said, “That’s completely inappropriate. You may not be able to avoid that $20,000,000, but it should never ever be a surprise. That’s where the problem is: it was a surprise.”
Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo asked if the FCMT had met with the Hayward Education Association (HEA), the teacher’s union. They explained that they don’t focus on sites or curriculum, just financial processes. If a Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA) was needed, they talked to them. “I wouldn’t agree that this is the report you use to make cuts,” they said. “This is a report that speaks to process and your risks.” They stressed that they are not involved in prioritizing what to cut, that’s up to the District. “You followed a pretty darn good process to get to a list,” they said, but stressed that if the budget isn’t accurate, it’ll never balance properly.
Trustee Bufete asked if FCMT favored a new bargaining agreement this year. “Best practice,” they said, “is that you don’t close a school year without an agreement.” Last year, the negotiations continued well into the following school year. Parents didn’t even get a school calendar until after the year had already started.
HEA Wants To Be Included
The President of HEA, Mercedes Faraj, didn’t agree with FCMT’s explanation about why Union Leadership wasn’t consulted. “I would think that we have something of value to offer,” she said, “and to sit here and listen that we did not is insulting.” As the FCMT pointed out, their focus was exclusively on District Office processes and procedures, which would mean significant inclusion of Association of Educational Office and Technical Employees (AEOTE) members, but likely many fewer HEA members.
Over $50 Million In Cuts Coming To HUSD
The Superintendent revealed the Fiscal Solvency Plan to cut $54,000,000 from the HUSD budget in the next two years. The cuts are coming in 3 different buckets:
One-Time Cuts for This Year ($12,000,000)
Ongoing Cuts ($37,000,000)
One-Time Cuts for Next Year ($5,000,000)
The reason the bigger cuts need to come right now is that the District will run out of money by May—if they don’t cut big now, they won’t be able to pay their Staff. The guiding principles that the District is using for the cuts are:
Prioritize services close to students
Sustain programs and services that support student wellbeing
Maintain solutions for student safety
Support the growth of existing programs that address changing student needs
The Superintendent made clear that they could not avoid these cuts. “This is something that must happen,” he said. “Either we make decisions or an outside group will come in and take control and they’ll make the decisions for us.” And the cuts are drastic—about 1/5th of the entire HUSD budget needs to be cut. Unfortunately, much of it is the result of old issues. “We have some deep systemic problems that we need to address,” the Superintendent said, “and we need to do it in a timely manner.”
At the same time, the Superintendent recognized that no matter the plan, it’s going to be painful. “With of a reduction of this size, it’s impossible to ensure that there will be zero impact on students,” he said, “but we wanted to prioritize as much as we could… reducing the impact as much as possible on students.”
Details On The Cuts
When looking at the details, this year’s one-time cuts focused on a hiring freeze and removing unfilled vacancies, budget sweeps, and maximizing existing grants. They’re also moving funds around—for example Prop 28 funds—to keep programs like Visual and Performing Arts positions through the year. But there wasn’t a plan, yet, to fund it for the next year.
For the ongoing cuts, the District is trying to focus on improving revenue and budget management, achieving fiscal solvency, and restructuring to serve a smaller student population. That means both trying to get new grants and cutting site and department budgets to match current enrollment. They’re also trying to return to pre-pandemic spending patterns and making trade-offs to try to keep some of the Pandemic-era additions—like Family Engagement Specialists. For restructuring, that’s just another way of saying layoffs.
The Superintendent stressed, “The overwhelming majority of reductions were not in people.” Only about 31% of all the cuts were from layoffs—though it’s around 45% of the ongoing cuts. Most of the cuts come from the District Office—72% in total—which is something that both the community and HEA pushed for. But when looking at layoffs by staffing type, people were less excited.
By money saved, the largest cuts were from HEA, the teacher’s union, with AEOTE coming next—they’re administrative staff. Management was only 24% of the layoffs by cost, because there are just fewer administrators to cut. By cost, the biggest impact will be felt by AEOTE and Management, which makes sense since everyone said they wanted most of the cuts to come from the District Office.
The most numerous cuts—by number of people—came from Teachers on Special Assignment in the Ed Services department with 18 positions being cut. 20 more teachers are slated to be eliminated by adjusting the Elementary and Secondary School Master schedules—perhaps pointing to scheduling inefficiencies.
Other notable layoffs include 11 Family Engagement Specialists, 9 Lead Custodians and Custodians, 5.5 Elementary Vice Principals, and 5.5 Youth Intervention Specialists. There were also some relatively minor cuts to Nursing and Psychologists, attributed to contractual obligation ratios—meaning they’re likely increasing the workload of everyone left to match the contract.
There were some other documents briefly presented during the meeting, but the bulk of the information available to the public can be found in the Executive Summary. Superintendent Reimann also said that the District will need to meet with the labor partners for future 1-time cuts. “If we don’t take action,” he said, “we will be looking at issues paying our bills.” He also reminded the Board that the plan must be approved by February 26th in order to avoid State intervention.
No, Not Like That!
The Board of Trustees were split on the proposed cuts, with some pushing back very hard for changes and others seeming to, at best, want to vaguely play around the edges. Trustee Rawdon asked Superintendent Reimann to re-explain, for the public’s benefit, why one-time funds were spent on ongoing costs. He re-explained that a lot of the cost was for personnel to address things like social distancing—meaning more teachers, social emotional supports to address educational outcomes, and engagement with families to combat absenteeism.
Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo again pushed to revisit external contracts. He said that the only list he had received totaled around $500,000 which is hardly exhaustive. Superintendent Reimann said that each department was responsible for its own reductions and that the list of contracts was not all contracts, just the ones that are slated to be cut.
Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo then dove into the claim about pre-pandemic staffing. In 2018/2019 there were 65 positions which increased to 90 right now and is only being reduced to 78 positions. The Superintendent explained that the extra positions have been shifted to restricted funds away from the General Fund.
Trustee Prada asked about the SIR and equity around the cuts. The Superintendent said that they focused on positions related to Literacy and Equity, which is directly related to the SIR. And for the equity lens, they listened to the student surveys, which prioritized athletics, and also made sure that site-specific allocations were kept as big as possible to allow site-specific control. He stressed that local sites will get to decide what’s important to their specific students and that higher need sites should get more funding.
Trustee Prada honed in on a SIR administrator position, wondering why that was being cut. Superintendent Reimann said that the position was reduced to .5 time, which is funded by the ACBOE. Trustee Prada was adamant that she wanted it to be a full-time position, but the Superintendent reminded her that if anything is pulled from the reduction, it needs to be replaced by an equal or larger cut somewhere else. She offered no alternatives.
Trustee Oquenda didn’t offer any changes, but tried to appease the audience of teachers, staff, and parents. “Tonight has been about an initial plan based on what we said was keeping this conversation student-centered,” she said. “And I know you all agree with that, and we know we’re here and what we’re doing in this district… This is the time to refine this list.”
Trustee Bufete asked if leadership was willing to furlough. “Absolutely,” Superintendent Reimann said before the question was even finished. “It would be an absence of leadership if any district employee was taking a furlough and I did not.”
Trustee Rawdon was concerned about how the cuts were allocated by staffing type, but didn’t offer any further thoughts. “I think we need to do some more tweaking,” he said.
Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo took aim at what positions were shifted to grant funding. “Those same grant funds could be used to save two or three people,” he said, “that are doing the work at the site level directly with families.” Considering the details of the grants were unclear, it’s not necessarily possible to spend the money at the site-level. Some grants are very prescriptive about how money can be spent.
Superintendent Reimann also pushed back at the call to cut even more management staff. “I know there’s always the temptation in terms of District Office reductions,” he said. “We just heard FCMT talk about not having systems in place. There is a point at which we do need to have systems in place at the District Office also.”
Trustee Rawdon agreed, to a point. “Somebody’s got to be minding the store,” he said. “At the same time, I know some of the phone calls I’ve received and the emails I’ve received and people are very straightforward about how they feel about certain management positions and I’ll be sharing that with you.”
Trustee Prada took up the cuts to multilingual learning. The Director of Multilingual Learning is slated to be cut, as well as 3 quarter-time positions for Bilingual Assessment Techs. “My personal comment is that this first proposal was a little vindictive in the way that I read it.” She also took issue with cuts to Family Engagement Specialists and, it was unclear, seemed to push for more cuts to Facilities, Maintenance, Operations, and Transportation—the sound was problematic at this meeting, though, so I could be wrong.
Trustee Prada also brought up “toxic environments” and seemed to suggest that some of the Management positions could be cut because staff had been doing the job, uncompensated and at the expense of their actual job, for a long time already. “If we don’t address some of the main systemic issues,” she said, “we’re going to hurt the kids… I’m urging you to do right. We have a week to do right.” However, she did not recommend anywhere specific where the cuts could be reallocated.
Trustee Bruckner-Carrillo complained again about supervisor positions being kept at the expense of rank and file staff. “It did not have to be this way,” he said. “It could have been transparent… I could not identify until Friday what positions we’re cutting at the District Office and even then it’s inadequate.” He felt that the proposed cuts were meant to save management positions at the District Office and referenced conflict between the District Management and the unions. “We have an opportunity to heal a longstanding divide between our labor partners and the District Office,” he said, “We had a chance to heal that divide.”
Unions And Parents Weigh In
The President of AEOTE, Deisy Bates, spoke during public comment to say that multiple alternatives to layoffs were identified by AEOTE members but that they were ignored by management. She was frustrated that too many management positions are being spared at the expense of AEOTE members.
The public comments went on for over two more hours—the meeting ended somewhere around 1 am—and was almost exclusively composed of people fighting to keep their jobs. Nurses, Print Shop employees, Painters, TOSAs, Attendance Clerks, and Multilingual Department members all made the case to make cuts elsewhere. Although I didn’t watch them all, there’s a chance that almost every department made the case to cut somewhere else.
Hold Still. This Is Going To Hurt. A Lot.
At the end of the day, cutting $54,000,000 from the budget is going to hurt people. There is no good way to cut that much from the District—people are going to lose their jobs. There is no amount of efficiency, no amount of grant funding, no amount of shifting costs around that can avoid them. And all of those jobs are, without doubt important. From Custodians to Teachers to TOSAS to Administrative Clerks to Family Engagement Specialists, every single one of them helps the District run smoothly and ensure that the apparatus of School continues functioning.
The Superintendent will not be able to make everyone happy. AEOTE is going to, justifiably, be mad. So is HEA. So is SEIU. But this is all the result of both old issues at the District and also how the State funds education. If things were funded equitably, we wouldn’t have to make these cuts. But instead we’re fighting against cuts that nobody wants to make that are going to hurt people, but we don’t want it to be us.
That’s human. It’s real. And it’s not fair. But nobody—no Trustee, no Parent, and no Employee—has a plan that will keep everyone employed. There are going to be cuts and there are going to be good people getting pink slips and it’s going to hurt. And there’s nothing anyone in the District can do about it.