Teachers in the state's 59 "basic aid" school districts have a good reason to fear the governor's proposal to raid the property tax revenue that largely funds these districts and use it to help ease the state's massive budget deficit.
The governor's plan - which CTA considers an illegal attack on school revenue - would hit basic aid districts much harder than the 1,000 other districts that are funded by the state. Teachers in these 59 so-called affluent districts are alarmed because their schools would be slammed twice - by property tax revenue reductions, and then by the impact of the steep cuts facing all districts.
For example, two basic aid districts in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto Unified and Santa Clara Unified, could see their entire budgets cut by more than 25 percent.
Instead of getting per-pupil funding averaging more than $4,500 in revenue-limit districts, basic aid districts get only $120 per student in state revenue funding. But most are located in areas with higher-than-average property taxes and have education programs that depend on excess property tax revenue that they get to keep.
Davis wants to eliminate the $120 per child to "save" $17 million, and is proposing to force these districts to return about 80 percent of extra property tax revenue to generate $126 million for the state.
"The hit on Santa Clara Unified would be pretty catastrophic," says Carson Crites, president of the 865-member United Teachers of Santa Clara and a psychologist at Buchser Middle School in Santa Clara. "This would put us back to revenue-limit status in one fell swoop. Teachers would be laid off and many of our programs would evaporate. Class size reduction would be history."
The raid on basic aid districts defeats CTA's goal of improving funding for all districts, says CTA President Wayne Johnson. "We want to level the funding up, not level it down."