Santa Barbara County has significant funding disparities among local school districts, with those in wealthy neighborhoods able to pay higher salaries to employees and teachers, while neighboring districts struggle to compete, according to a recent study. 

California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) allocates funds to districts based on student population, demographics and need.

If a district would receive more money from local property tax revenue than it would from the LCFF allocation, then that district would be considered a basic aid or community funded district, and won’t receive its LCFF allocation.

This was implemented in 2013 in an effort to provide more money to districts with higher needs. The recent study, “Excess Revenue, Unequal Opportunity,” found that Santa Barbara is among California counties with large funding gaps between basic aid districts, which often have higher property tax revenues and a lower percentage of high-need students, and LCFF districts, which often have more high-need and low-income students.

Excess advantage districts in Santa Barbara County have an average per-student revenue of approximately $33,000, while LCFF districts have a per-student revenue of approximately $21,000, according to the analysis.

In the case of the Carpinteria Unified School District (CUSD), it receives approximately $18,000 per student as a basic aid district. If it were a LCFF district, Superintendent Diana Rigby noted, they would receive approximately $14,000 per student. 

The state funding is based on enrollment, and with declining enrollment at several local school districts, including CUSD, Rigby said they would be getting less money each year if CUSD was entirely state funded. 

“When we have reduced enrollment, then we have more money to spend on per student,” Rigby said. 

One drawback for basic aid districts is that when the state allocates funds for certain programs, those funds will only go to LCFF districts. 

For example, this year, when all school districts were mandated to implement transitional kindergarten classes, the state gave additional funding for those programs to LCFF-funded districts, while basic aid districts had to rely on their existing budget to pay for it. 

For CUSD, that meant they weren’t able to offer more than two transitional kindergarten classes this year. This led to families being placed on a waitlist and having to find other options for their students. 

Jordan Goines, assistant superintendent of fiscal services for the Goleta Union School District (GUSD), said because their funding comes from local property taxes, they are at the whim of changing economic and political environments. 

“It’s volatile to the point where we have to keep in mind what’s going on in the greater political environment to see how taxes are being levied,” Goines said. 

Because of this, Goines said the district has to be in a position to maintain higher revenue in case the local economy suffers and property taxes go down. The district receives approximately $23,000 per student per year from property tax revenue. 

“Whenever that kind of situation happens, that puts a school district in a volatile situation,” Goines said. “So that’s why we have to maintain higher reserves.”

One benefit for basic aid districts, according to Goines, is that they have a bit more freedom with their spending, while state funds are usually earmarked for specific purposes. 

“We have the ability to use the funding the way our community, our needs assessments kind of warrants them to be used, and we can globalize them a little bit more towards the bigger system,” Goines said.

While LCFF-funded districts don’t have to worry about changes to local property values, they are affected by changes to state politics and budgets. 

The county’s largest school district, Santa Maria-Bonita School District, receives approximately $264 million from state funding, which comes out to approximately $16,000 per average daily attendance. That is determined by the total number of days of student attendance divided by the total number of days in the regular school year. 

Matthew Beecher, deputy superintendent for business services at the Santa Maria-Bonita School District, said getting funding from the state can be more predictable, which makes it easier to plan for their budget. However, bad economic years tend to have a big impact on school districts.

“The state’s funding is based so much on our highest taxpayers and on capital gains that in down years, the shortfall in state revenue for schools can be severe,” Beecher said. “When we are looking at uncertain economic times, we have to plan pretty conservatively.”

When the state is facing a budget issue, Beecher said the state will sometimes have to defer funds that the district was relying on for a few weeks. 

“That’s impactful when you’re dependent on that revenue every month to pay all the bills that you have coming; your bill collectors aren’t waiting until you get the money, they want their money right then,” Beecher said. “Because we’re so heavily state funded, the more the state leans on that mechanism to create budget savings, the more impactful it is on the district’s cash flow.”

Beecher said deferrals today “aren’t very significant,” but they did cause serious cash flow issues in the early 2010s. 

Hiring Challenges

The study concluded that because basic aid districts receive more money per student than LCFF-funded districts, they’re able to pay employees a high salary and attract more qualified teachers. 

Beecher said their ability to hire and maintain employees is contingent on the state economy.

“When the state has to make cuts because the economy cools off, it can be a challenge to continue to hire or to maintain the employees that we have,” Beecher said. “When the economy cools off, the funding that the school district is going to get is going to have a severe negative reaction to that.”

Goines said they’ve been successful hiring local residents; however, it’s hard to get people to come in from outside the area. 

“I come from a district out in the Antelope Valley, and for me to move into Goleta was an impossibility,” Goines said. “So I can’t live in Goleta, I’ll live in Oxnard, or some other space, because of the cost of living here. So that does turn into a little bit of a hurdle. So if we’re trying to hire people from outside, that’s hard.”