State law required San Francisco Unified to work with the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) on a “fiscal health risk review” because the state superintendent of public instruction had “labeled the district a lack of going concern.”
“Going broke” is another term for “lack of going concern.”
Education authorities certainly made it appear that way, but it cannot be easy going broke on a $1.1 billion K–12 education budget in “the most childless city in the country.”
Here is a synopsis of FCMAT’s findings, provided by Chad Aldeman of The 74 Million. According to FMCAT, San Francisco Unified
- The government paid for employee roles using one-time relief monies; it will be necessary to fire them or find alternative sources of income or savings.
- The projected student enrollment has not been modified to reflect ongoing decreases.
- The system overstates the average daily attendance when estimating future income because it does not keep track of monthly attendance data.
- The company has an understaffed budget office, poor payroll system oversight, and issues monitoring employee overtime expenses.
- In total, SFU has expended $1.3 billion out of its $1.1 billion budget. Indeed, “a lack of going concern.”
There were two factors that hindered my ability to calculate the amount San Francisco spent on each student.
One issue is that San Francisco Unified is uncertain about the precise number of students it should be teaching, based on my calculation of $1,300,000,000 divided by equals. And while that may amuse us both for a little while, it is not exactly illuminating. At the very least, it doesn’t align with the perspective of San Francisco Unified.
Regardless of how excellent your local district may be, there is a darker side to all those dollar-per-pupil statistics you see. In actuality, not much has changed throughout the years in terms of the amount of money that goes toward the classroom (i.e., supplies, books, seats, etc., and even the teacher’s pay). Administrative expenses consume almost all additional funds. Eliminate at least two tiers of management, give taxpayers billions back, and improve education while significantly cutting down on red tape and leftist ideology.
Florida provides a mirror image of what’s happening in San Francisco Unified.
The reason Florida’s public schools are also struggling is that a record number of parents are pulling their children out of the classroom and enrolling them in private or charter schools, or even homeschooling them, thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis’s successful backing of school choice.
If you give parents a choice, they will almost always make a wise decision. Others continue to send their children to public schools while wondering, as many in San Francisco do, where all the money has gone.
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