The Abridged version:
- The Sacramento City Unified School District has faced its share of budget woes in the past. But leaders say they now have an unprecedented level of trouble.
- Time is running out for the district to get a handle on its $170 million crisis. The pressure is mounting, and with no apparent solutions, tempers are flaring between some board members and staff.
- Three trustees are up for reelection this fall. Two of them confirmed they will run again.
Sacramento City Unified is no stranger to a budget problem. But with years of bad budgetary practices and few options on the table, leaders say this year’s ordeal is the worst to date.
The district has been in a multimillion-dollar sinkhole since September. Latest projections show a $170 million gap in the budget and envision Sacramento City Unified running out of money before the start of the next school year.
That deadline, along with the size and scale of the problem, has varied month to month. Seesawing figures make finding a fix that much harder, leaders say. And the unstable ground is leading to tension between elected board members and top department staff.
The chronic fiscal chaos has cost the district and its leaders the trust of some families, who say they are already too used to dysfunction in Sacramento City Unified.
“We have to deal with it,” interim Superintendent Cancy McArn said. “We can’t continue to move forward how we have in the past. We have to do things differently.”
Then versus now
School budget experts diagnosed Sacramento City Unified’s laundry list of issues in a December report.
That analysis from the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state-funded organization that assists districts in distress, was “remarkably similar” to one seven years ago, said school board President Tara Jeane.
Leadership instability, deficit spending and poor budget development were all recurring areas of concern.
According to a state auditor’s report from the time, the crisis in 2018 was fueled by increased spending on teacher salaries, employee benefits and special education — all areas that have been called into question more recently.
The difference between now and almost a decade ago, McArn said, is a feeling back then like the district had more options for pulling itself out of a multimillion-dollar hole. Ultimately, the budget was buoyed by one-time pandemic-related funds.
“This feels and is different,” said McArn, who served as chief human resources officer for the district before becoming interim superintendent in February.
From bad to worse
The temporary influx of money during COVID-19 masked the district’s underlying problems, according to several experts and people familiar with Sacramento City Unified.
It also allowed previous leaders to push off the harder conversations, Jeane said. None of the current trustees was on the board at the time of the last fiscal crisis team report.
Without a firm financial foundation, Sacramento City Unified was ill-prepared for $40 million worth of unexpected expenses, which came to light last fall.
That combined with a new teacher’s contract based on out-of-date numbers and a districtwide issue with unauthorized spending created the current problem. “It’s like a perfect storm,” Jeane said. “And I kind of hate using that cliché as an English teacher.”
‘All of us are responsible’
Yet the problems are not the fault of just one person, department or entity, she and McArn each emphasized.
“We have a broken system,” Jeane said in an interview.
The broken parts include unchecked spending habits, too many outside contracts and a tendency to make decisions with incomplete information, she said.
In a statement from early February, Jeane said, “Ultimately all of us are responsible and all of us must be part of the solution.”
Board and staff clash
An all-hands-on-deck situation has led to more than a few frayed nerves.
“That tension is … noticeable and real,” McArn said.
Most palpably that has played out between the board and its interim chief business officer, Lisa Grant-Dawson.
“She comes in here with a message that is like, ‘This is all the bad stuff, and there’s no plan. Thank you, goodbye,’” said Trustee Taylor Kayatta, one of the more outspoken board members.
“Then the public just thinks our schools are just failing imminently,” he continued. “There’s a way to share that information with the public that is, I think, more productive.”
Grant-Dawson, who has been on staff since January, defended her “bad news” presentations as part of the diagnostic process. “I had no idea the degree of where the district was” before arriving, Grant-Dawson said in an interview.
A level of accountability needed
Kayatta has penned lengthy social media posts, pulling the curtain back on his dissatisfaction with staff.
“I don’t like to bring that level of sausage-making out to the public,” he said. “But people are rightfully concerned with where we are right now, and I think that level of accountability is called for.”
Three board members are up for reelection this fall: Kayatta, Jeane and Jasjit Singh. Jeane and Kayatta confirmed they will be running again. Singh did not respond to a request to confirm his plans.
‘Stop whining’
DiAnne Brown knows she will not be voting for Kayatta come November.
Brown lives in Kayatta’s district, which covers the Pocket, Greenhaven and parts of South Land Park neighborhoods. She is a former Sacramento City Unified employee and parent to two graduates of the district.
“Just do the job you were elected to do and stop whining,” Brown wrote in the comments of his Facebook post. “You represent my neighborhood, but you’ll not be getting my vote next time.”
“I guess I just got tired of him making excuses,” she told Abridged.
Brown is coming up on two years of retirement from Sacramento City Unified. She loved her job as the only full-time grant writer on staff. But she said when she left in 2024, “I could see the writing on the wall.”
“I just don’t know if this district has ever been run in a fiscally smart way,” Brown said.
Worst case scenario
On one point, she and Kayatta agree — a state bailout would be the worst-case scenario for Sacramento City Unified.
Staff and board members are desperately working to avoid having to turn to the state for a loan and cede power to a county-appointed administrator.
Kayatta said he can understand why some members of the public might wonder why a state takeover would be so bad.
“It’s a pretty clear way to think,” he said. “It’s like, what we have isn’t working, we need to do something new.”
But Kayatta said he has seen the negatives firsthand, while previously working for the state controller’s office and auditing a district under the burden of an emergency loan.
“I don’t want my kids to be in a school (district) where there’s a new receiver coming in every year,” he said. “Cutting the services that we value because they make sense to some number cruncher who doesn’t really have connection to our community.”
Kayatta compared the experience to a beloved local business being bought out by a larger corporate entity, only to have the quality deteriorate.
The clock is ticking for the district to find a solution. But McArn said she and others in charge remain determined.
“We have not just an obligation to our students and our families and our staff, but the city,” she said. “Like, we’re Sac City. We have to figure this out.”
Savannah Kuchar is a reporter covering education. She came to Sacramento to be a part of the Abridged team and contribute to a crucial local news source.