Legislature approves final state budget

www.acsa.org

Association of California School Administrators

July 10, 2023

The California State Legislature voted to approve the 2023-24 state budget — which proposes $108.3 billion in total education spending — and sent it to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature June 27.

The final budget bill package includes a single budget bill and almost two dozen trailer bills. If Newsom signs the bills, the budget would fully fund an 8.22 percent cost-of-living adjustment for the Local Control Funding Formula using $1.7 billion in one-time funds.

That COLA would also be extended to adult education, special education and other programs outside LCFF, said Legislative Advocate Megan Baier on the ACSA Legislative Lunch Break.

The budget would create a $300 million equity multiplier, which Newsom initially proposed in January, to support school sites with high concentrations of students living in poverty.

Baier said the governor hoped to use the multiplier to direct funding toward African American students in low-performing schools, but the method proposed in the initial budget to distribute the funds did not end up benefiting as many of those students as intended.

“In this final agreement, they’ve kept the $300 million, but they’re using a completely different methodology to allocate the funds,” she said.

The money would go to sites with a “non-stability rate” greater than 25 percent, referring to the percentage of students who do not complete the school year due to factors like expulsion, and to sites with more than 70 percent socio-economically disadvantaged students. Those students include homeless and foster youth.

The final budget also makes changes to transitional kindergarten. Baier said that the current student-to-teacher ratio for TK is one teacher to 12 students. The budget would require TK classrooms to begin maintaining a 1-to-10 ratio beginning in 2025-26 without a guarantee of funding the ratio that school year. Instead, the budget contains “intent language” without the funds being necessarily available.

“People power costs money,” Baier said. “And it’s a complete 180 ... there was an acknowledgment of how much it costs to staff these classrooms with these younger children. This will be one of our top priorities.”

On the plus side, Baier said, the budget extends the deadline for TK teachers to earn their additional childhood education credits to 2025.

Read ACSA's full analysis on the Resource Hub.