Schoolsmay askfor moremoney

District officials say the state has set up a system that has created great inequalities between school districts. The San Mateo-Foster City School District receives the lowest per-student funding in the county -- below the state average, despite the high costs of living here. The district could receive an additional $5.6 million annually if fully funded by the state, officials say.

"The state system of financing needs serious attention if this district is going to get the pot of financing it deserves and not have to keep cutting budgets," said Assistant Superintendent Tish Busselle. "There are serious equity issues both in the county and across the state, and there are serious equity issues on how programs are funded."

Last year the district undertook a similar effort to pressure the state for more money.

In May, Superintendent Rick Damelio rode his bicycle to Sacramento with a group of teachers and staff and was joined on the steps of the Capitol by thousands of other educators from the district and around the state.

They demanded that legislators eliminate the deficit factor -- an outgrowth of the early 1990s which limited each dollar in state educational funding to 93 cents. The rest of the money went into the state's coffers during the economic recessions, but until last year had never been restored. The district gained $3.9 million in back funds from the state, from which the current teacher salary raises are being negotiated.

Thursday night, Damelio decided to take up the torch again at a board meeting where he announced his plan to capture more sources of lost funding from the state. His analysis of district funding showed a loss of over $3.6 million from the district's general fund for special education, because the state and federal governments have not fully funded the costs of the mandated programs and services. The Daily Journal was unable to reach Damelio for comment yesterday.

The state also takes over a million dollars each year from the support staff's retirement accounts because the investments have been doing so well. That money would otherwise go back into the general fund.

And if the state equalized its 30-year-old formula used to calculate school district funding and brought this district up to the level of the state average in per student spending, the district could gain an additional $500,000 annually. That would equal about a 1 percent increase in salaries for all district staff.

Currently the district receives $4,254 per student -- $50 less than the state average and about 40 percent less than the top-funded districts in the county like the San Mateo Union High School District.

The district may receive warm support from state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-San Mateo) who an aide said has in past years pushed for increased spending on education and more equal funding across school districts.

"Senator Speier strongly supports education and strongly supports money for education and is certainly attuned to the problem of underfunding in some districts. Equal funding is important. She fought for that last year and certainly will fight for this year," said Manny Hernandez, educational advisor to Speier.

But Speier is not on the state educational panel or the educational finance committee, and so has limited pull in how much educational funding reaches the final budget proposal.

District officials say they will have more sway if they work collectively with other districts. Damelio plans to meet with county school board associations and other superintendents to raise support for some kind of collective action, Busselle said. They will have until the end of the state legislature's budgeting sessions in May to make their push for additional educational funding.

"People in Sacramento need to hear that the way things are funded now are not sufficient and it takes the voiced of many people up and down the state," Busselle said. "Hopefully this is getting started in a lot of places. We're certainly taking leadership because we're at the bottom of the county and we're having to compete with other districts who have more revenue than we do."

Perhaps the most important move now will be garnering the support of staff, parents, and the community to lobby the state again this year. District officials plan to have a series of educational forums with the public over the next few months.

But with parents and teachers sour over the current state of the tentative agreement for pay raises, Damelio's success in rallying the troops may be fruitless. Most teachers currently feel that Damelio has let them down and broken a lot of promises -- they expected a much higher pay raise than was offered to them after five months of negotiations.

"If he's going to try to get more money for the district, great. But he went to Sacramento and tried to get the money before and stabbed us in the back, so we don't trust him," said Jim Remington, a Sunnybrae Elementary teacher and president of the San Mateo Teachers Association. "The wounds that have been created are deep and it's going to take a while to heal those wounds. I don't think the teachers are going to follow the superintendent very far at this point."

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