![]() “Districts in areas with lower property values are really struggling,” Vincent said. Any statewide bond should include significant aid for rural, small and low-income districts. ![]() ![]() Nearly 40% of California’s school districts can’t raise enough through local bonds - those that manage to pass them - to cover necessary repair costs. And yet that’s not something that exists for school facilities.”Īlthough both bills in the Legislature include tweaks to make funding more equitable, they don’t go far enough, said Jeff Vincent, co-founder of the Center for Cities and Schools at UC Berkeley. There’s all these efforts to correct inequities. “There’s an understanding in California that we shouldn’t have these big inequities when it comes to books, supplies, resources. More (school facilities) money goes to higher-income students than lower-income students,” Lafortune said. Meanwhile, the same year in rural San Lucas, south of King City in Monterey County, the school district tried passing a bond that would have taxed property owners more than twice that rate, but because the average home price is below $300,000 the bond would have raised only $3.6 million. In 2022, for example, the Mill Valley School District in Marin County was able to raise $194 million through a bond that taxed local property owners just 2.6 cents per $100 of a property’s assessed value – in a city where the average home price hovers around $2 million. In addition, districts can qualify for matching funds from the state, so “the more you have, the more you get,” said Julien Lafortune, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California. Not only are voters more likely to approve new taxes – the usual way that districts repay bonds – but property values are higher, thereby bringing in more money. Typically, larger, urban and more affluent districts, which also tend to be more liberal, have an easier time raising funds. Although California has lavished money on schools in the past few years, most of that money is earmarked for efforts to help students recover from the pandemic. Money comes from state and local bonds, which generate finite amounts of money, usually through property taxes. Unlike most other states, California does not have a permanent funding stream for repairing school facilities. Photos by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local Multiple projects keep going on at the campus due to a lack of funds to continue. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local Fourth: Construction sites in the hallways of the Keyes Elementary School in Keyes on Nov. Photo by Clara Mokri for CalMatters Third: A building used as a storage facility boarded up and no longer in use at the Keyes Elementary School in Keyes on Nov. Photo by Clara Mokri for CalMatters Second: A rusted roof at Pacific Elementary School in Santa Cruz on Nov. ![]() I don’t want the next generation of students to have to experience this.”įirst: Water damage inside a classroom at Pacific Elementary School in Santa Cruz on Nov. … I’m speaking up about this because I feel the system needs to be fixed. “This school is in such bad shape it can feel like a jail. “The big question is, why can’t our kids have school buildings that are safe and as nice as other kids’ schools, just a few miles away?” said Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keyes Union School District, a rural TK-8 district in a low-income area south of Modesto. And it won’t change a system that they say favors wealthy, urban, left-leaning areas that can easily pass local bond measures to make needed repairs. In some cases, leaking roofs, dry rot and broken air conditioners haven’t been fixed in years.Īs California’s fund to fix crumbling schools dwindles to nothing, lawmakers are negotiating behind the scenes to craft a ballot measure that would be the state’s largest school construction bond in decades.īut some beleaguered school superintendents say the money will not be nearly enough to fix all the dry rot, leaky roofs and broken air conditioners in the state’s thousands of school buildings. Small, rural districts often struggle to pass local bond measures to pay for school construction and repairs.
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