In late September, it didn’t look like things could get much worse for Santa Barbara’s Hope School District.
It was revealed that month that the three-school district faced an $800,000 budget shortfall for the present school year because of major accounting errors and state funding changes.
With only a couple weeks to submit a revised 2016-2017 budget to the county, severe cuts had to be made, including to library clerks, health clerks, instructional aides, special education staff, custodial staff and management compensation.
As pink slips started to go out, however, a grassroots fundraising campaign led by the Hope School District Education Foundation launched an all-out effort to save many of those positions before the end of the year.
In the intervening time, the foundation has raised over $260,000 — $255,000 of which was scheduled to be presented to the district Board of Trustees Monday night.
Not all staff cuts have been reversed by the efforts of the “Campaign for Hope” — custodial staff is still down — but instructional aides, intervention teachers, librarians and health clerks have been fully restored, district Superintendent Anne Hubbard said.
The rapid turnaround is “due to the incredible efforts of the foundation and the community at large,” she said.
The Hope School District teaches roughly 1,000 students in Hope, Monte Vista and Vieja Valley elementary schools in northwestern Santa Barbara.
It had an immediate shortfall of about $386,000, the district’s board of trustees said at a September town hall meeting with parents.
That number ballooned to roughly $800,000 when the need to restore the district’s 4-percent reserve fund was figured in.
“What happened this year had to be dealt with immediately,” Hubbard said. “We didn’t have the gift of time, so to speak, to really look and make these tough decisions.”
Due to the cuts incorporated into this year’s rewritten budget, however, the district no longer has a shortfall, said Hubbard, who was hired as superintendent in June.
The district, though, is already in the preliminary planning stages for its 2017–2018 budget, and now has the time to properly sort out its funding priorities, she said. Come January and February, the board will have to decide where to put the money it does have.
Wrapped up with the district’s budget crisis were increasingly unfavorable funding arrangements for special education.
In addition to state-level changes to special education funding, the district was contracting with the county to provide those services. As other districts left the county’s “pay-as-you-go” model, Hope’s share of the costs was increasing.
Hubbard said that thanks to the foresight of the board, her predecessor Daniel Cooperman and Hope special education coordinator Jestin St. Peter, the district had already begun taking back its special education programs before anyone was even aware of the budget crisis.
“We can budget much more appropriately now because we control that,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Hope School District Education Foundation’s efforts have centered on stabilizing staffing positions, said foundation board president Holly Leck.
The bulk of the money the foundation raised came from the parent community, she said, which was also the campaign’s primary target.
“Our focus has been more on family participation than any one dollar amount because we need to have skin in the game,” Leck said. “Having our immediate community saying, ‘We’re going to do something about this’ and standing by it is important for donors who are outside of the district.”
A grant from Goleta IT company Curvature, matching donations from parents’ employers, contributions from a few other family foundations, corporate events and student-led fundraising drives all played a role in the foundation’s campaign.
However, the fact that so many parents became actively engaged with the district in its time of need will also be good for the district in the long term, Leck said.
“There’s interest and momentum in figuring out, ‘How do we get beyond this?’” she said.
“Traditional public school funding just isn’t enough, and we need to figure out a new approach to ensuring that we have all the resources we can gather to be able to do a better job in our schools.”
In the coming weeks, the foundation plans to kick off the next school year’s fundraising with a letter to district property owners asking for donations, before developing a more organized grant-writing and community partnership arm.
Ultimately, the foundation would like to establishment an endowment that would help fill in any future funding gaps and step in during tough times.
“Developing a strong district-wide foundation that works strategically to develop additional sources of funding and resources through community engagement is key,” Leck said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.