Good news is coming from the state capital, in the form of surprise funding for the Santa Barbara Unified School District.

The district will receive $3 million to fund special education, $9.8 million to be used at the district’s discretion, and $2.4 million that will go toward improving student outcomes.

Conrad Tedeschi, assistant superintendent of Business Services, updated the Board of Trustees about the new funds at last week’s board meeting.

Board president William Banning said the extra funding gives the district some room to plan for the future.

“This is really good news for us in terms of having the cushion and the flexibility to be looking down the road and trying to make some really good strategic decisions with it,” Banning said.

The state also distributed a Student Support and Professional Development Discretionary Block Grant. That will bring the district $9.8 million to go toward dual enrollment, teacher recruitment, professional development or rising costs.

Tedeschi said district leadership will work together to determine some of the priority items for spending the money.

“I think we should be able to find some good things to spend this money on,” Tedeschi said. “There’s a lot of interest, a lot of things we’d like to do, but like I said, we’re going to all work together to come up with a good plan.”

The district has until 2032 to use the grant.

No timeline has been decided for when the district will decide how to use the funds, but Tedeschi said he’d like to come up with something before the first interim budget review for next year.

The district also received a $2.4 million Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant to go toward funding actions and expenditures in the Local Control Accountability Plan. That outlines how educational agencies can leverage resources to improve student test scores.

That $2.4 million must be used by the end of next year.

Again, Tedeschi said he will work with district leadership to come up with ideas on how to spend the money to make improvements to operations. 

“With that in mind, how can we not just take care of this, but how can we invest in something that could have future benefit?” Tedeschi said.