According to California State Senator, Joe Simitian, 95 percent of school districts in California do not have enough money to pay for necessary programs. Why is this?

Rather than having local property taxes fund school districts in California, making schools more self-sufficient and more independent from the state, the California legislature provides direct funding for schools. According to Simitian, this causes a deficit that affects important California school programs.

To reduce the deficit, Simitian is currently working on Bill 1358, which aims to equalize the overall funding of all schools by putting an additional $200 million into the state education fund.

Simitian says this will stimulate advancement in the level of education for many of the schools in California. The bill was to be reviewed in its first committee hearing on April 5, to be set in place for the next fiscal year.

Simitian says that most states in the US fund their district schools by local property taxes, making them less dependent on their state governments for funding.

"There are still far too many districts [in California] that are far below where they should be," Simitian said.

According to Simitian, if passed, the bill will distribute money to schools with no specific requirements for how the money should to be spent.

"Each district has very different needs, so they should decide what’s most important [for them]," Simitian said.

Pearl Cheng, who is a member of the Cupertino Union School Board, said that the Cupertino Union District would use this money to maintain key staff and preserve programs where sixteen thousand or more students would be affected.

Above all, Simitian hopes to make sure every school is able to give its students equal opportunities.

"It’s a fairness question," Simitian said. "[It wouldn’t be fair to say] sorry, you’re in the wrong town or city [based on previous laws that have been passed], so your school gets a couple thousand dollars less than other schools."

According to Cheng, even though the overall level of property taxes in Cupertino have risen over the past years, the formulas that decide how much money the district gets to keep were created based on when Cupertino and other revenue limit districts had much lower property taxes, so the percentage of revenue that these districts can now keep is too low to adequately support their school districts.

Though Bill 1358 will not change these formulas, Cheng noted that this bill is very important for public education, as it would provide more money for these revenue limit school districts.

However, Cheng also said "until we bring all equations to a fair state this [effort] will not be done."

According to Cheng, these formulas have caused a large gap between basic aid and revenue limit school districts. About $8000-$10,000 is spent per pupil in basic aid districts whereas Cupertino Union District only gets $4,600 per pupil. Cheng said Bill 1358 would reduce this gap.

"This wouldn’t affect Palo Alto schools directly," Simitian said. This is because Palo Alto, along with about 60 other school districts is a basic aid school, meaning that it gets to keep the extra revenue it earns from local property taxes.

However, as a basic aid school district, PAUSD has been subject to bills in the past that could have taken money away from their district, in order to fund other schools throughout the state.

"This [bill] will make Palo Alto less vulnerable from having their money taken away," Simitian said.

This situation occurred in Palo Alto in 2003 when Gray Davis announced budget proposals that would have taken $120 per-student funding away from basic aid school districts, cutting the districts budget by 25 percent, meaning a $30 million loss for Palo Alto schools over an 18 month period, according to Palo Alto Weekly reporter Priya Padmanabha.

Simitian believes this bill has a good chance of passing into law as he has many supporters including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, there have been past efforts similar to this that have been unsuccessful.

Following a court decision in 1972, Serrano v. Priest, the California State Supreme Court decided that California needed to "level up" school funding by mandating minimum revenue limits for schools in districts with lower property taxes.

Proposition 13 arose in response to the Serrano cases in 1978, reducing the overall level of revenue generated from local property taxes. As a result, the state had to make up for the difference by using state money to fund the schools.

"There were unintended consequences that [the state] didn’t really predict," Cheng said.

The state then was not able to distribute enough money to every school district according to Simitian.

However, Simitian thinks the bill will prove successful, partly because of the $200 million provided by Proposition 98, and the slight increase in state revenue this year that will be placed into the state’s public education fund.