Insolvency by summer still threatens Sacramento school district, budget chief says
New interim chief business officer Lisa-Grant Dawson told a frustrated board of trustees at a meeting Thursday night that the Sacramento City Unified School District is still at risk of running out of money by summer.
Last month, a state agency deemed the district at “high risk” of insolvency. Grant-Dawson, who has been in her role for less than two weeks, alarmed the trustees at Thursday’s board meeting when she questioned the efficacy of several components of the district’s fiscal solvency plan.
“You do have several items on here that will not yield either what is projected or you are not going to be able to operationalize it to the degree that it states,” Grant-Dawson said.
In her presentation Thursday night, Grant-Dawson drew attention to vague components of the fiscal solvency plan that are intended to boost revenue or cut costs.
She used a line reading “eliminate use of ‘blanket’ purchase orders” as an example, saying that their use is standard operational practice and eliminating them could create unintended consequences. Grant-Dawson said the intention behind the measure was to avoid a flood of expenditures at the end of the school year, instead of a more even pace of spending.
Clarity was an issue in other areas. Grant-Dawson was also unclear about what “nonclassroom” positions meant in terms of a hiring freeze.
She was also unsure of how the budget staff determined that an enrollment decline in coming years would yield $8 million in savings considering that fewer students also means less revenue for the district.
Communicating budget cuts
Grant-Dawson urged precision in terms of the plan’s language and also stressed the importance of impact statements to show those affected by the cuts that the district had a specific purpose in mind when instituting the cut, and was aware of its potential consequences.
“The community has to understand: When we make the changes, what is the impact,” she said.
The business services department is currently working to implement components of the 2026-27 budget development plan, including laying off district administrators and reducing department budgets by 20% across the board.
Several administrators have received notice that their jobs would not exist after June, according to Garrett Kirkland, a high school principal and president of the union that represents district administrators.
District trustees look for options
Trustees, whose frustration with district staff and culture has long predated Grant-Dawson’s time in Sacramento, seemed unhappy with the presentation, sensing few solutions for the budget crisis and a lack of urgency to find them.
Early in her presentation, Grant-Dawson noted that it hasn’t been that long since staff began planning for fiscal solvency. Trustee Taylor Kayatta pushed back on the comment, saying that it has been a short amount of time but ”we’re dealing with an urgent crisis.”
“Meeting after meeting has gone by, but it feels like we haven’t really started digging into this yet,” he said. “It’s like we’ve been planning to plan.”
Kayatta asked to see progress on this year’s cost-cutting measures visualized like a fundraising thermometer where they could see the progress toward recovering the $70 million needed to avoid insolvency.
Board President Tara Jeane asked pointblank if the district was on track to avoid running out of money by June. “No,” answered Grant-Dawson.
Jeane and Kayatta pledged to be involved in the budget development process.
“I think this board has made it pretty clear that we can’t just sit back and let this happen,” Kayatta said. “We’re going to be in it to make sure that we are spearheading the change of the culture of this district.”
Jeane, Kayatta and Trustee Michael Benjamin are a part of a recently formed subcommittee that will meet regularly with the budget services team.
