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Thanks to roughly $6.8 million in one-time COVID-19 relief dollars, Del Norte Unified School District officials are hiring for teaching positions left vacant and unfunded when trustees adopted the 2020-21 budget in July.

Of that extra money, however, DNUSD must spend about $3.17 million by Dec. 30, Assistant Superintendent of Business Jeff Napier told trustees Thursday.

DNUSD is also expecting the state to defer $7.7 million in funding to the 2021-22 fiscal year. Napier said he will bring a resolution regarding a tax revenue anticipation note, or TRAN, to the Board of Trustees at its next meeting.

Superintendent Jeff Harris said a TRAN was a payday loan the district would use to meet its financial obligations, including paying its staff.

“These are things affecting the whole state,” Harris told trustees. “We’re not unique in this situation. It is the entire state.”

In May, California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed cutting $13.5 billion from education for the 2020-21 fiscal year. However, on June 29, the Legislature passed a budget that doesn’t include those cuts.

California schools also received $1 billion in learning loss mitigation dollars, while the formula for special education funding was adjusted to set the base rate at about $625 per student. According to Harris, this is a “significant jump” for the special education local planning area that Del Norte is part of.

But if the Golden State will defer about $11 billion in education funding to the 2021-22 fiscal year if it doesn’t receive $13 billion in additional federal COVID-19 relief dollars by Sept. 1, Napier said.

“I’m not sure what will happen since we found out that Congress has gone on vacation now,” he said. “We won’t have anything by Sept. 1.”

Of the roughly $3.17 million in relief dollars the district must spend by Dec. 30, $2.86 million is from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act Congress passed in March. According to Napier, the state couldn’t use any of that money until its budget was approved. The state also kicked in $310,652 in Proposition 98 dollars, which must also be spent by Dec. 30, Napier said.

According to Napier, the district can’t purchase personal protective equipment with the extra COVID-19 relief dollars it is receiving. And finding qualified personnel, training them and getting them to take a job that’s only guaranteed through Dec. 30 is difficult, he said.

However, according to Harris, after the district closed schools in March due to the pandemic, it purchased 1,000 additional computers at about $400 each. DNUSD also used its school buses to deliver meals to families though schools were closed, Harris said, and it was also paying retail prices for the food that it was delivering toward the end of the school year.

“We could go back and calculate the cost of running transportation during that time and allocate the COVID money for that,” Harris said referring to the money the district must spend by the end of December. “There is the potential too of going back and saying how much more (retail food) costs us than the commodities. We would have been in the black with commodities, but we were in the red with retail. We could fill that retail with COVID money and bring us back down to what it had been in the black had we not been paying retail.”

Harris said district administration also hope “somebody comes to their senses and go, ‘Schools aren’t over in December’ and allow us the ability to extend that.”

As for regular state education funding, Napier said deferrals are expected to start in February 2021. DNUSD would normally get $660,000 in February; $2.2 million in March; $1 million in April; and $1 million in May, he said. But, at this point, that money won’t come to the district until September, October and November of the 2021-22 fiscal year.

This means that the state will double up on the allocation it gives to DNUSD and other districts in a given month, Napier said. And if the state dips into its rainy day fund, it must reimburse that fund before it can reimburse school districts.

Napier compared this round of deferrals to how the state handled education funding during the Great Recession in 2008-09. The district didn’t receive all of that deferred funding until the 2017-18 fiscal year, he said.

“The amount of deferrals here is a little bit more than the total amount of deferrals done through the entire recession,” Napier said. “(The state) was doing only one or two deferrals each year and then they would add another one. These are more deferrals in one year than were (done) during the entire recession.”

This gave school districts more time to plan, Napier said. He told trustees he’ll have a better idea of how the district’s cash flow will be affected by the deferrals when he brings more information to the school board on a TRAN.

“As we’re budgeting, we have to anticipate those months we’re paying the TRAN back,” he said. “We may have to make more cuts to our budget just to be able to pay back the TRAN in the next year.”

Trustee Area 4 representative Charlaine Mazzei asked about the general obligation bond money the district had, noting that when it was anticipating cuts, it deferred maintenance and refrained from entering into contracts to upgrade air conditioning systems at some schools due to the cash flow issue.

Napier noted that the GO Bond dollars wouldn’t make up for the deferred state education dollars. He also said “legal advice is don’t borrow from a GO Bond ever.”

“I would not make that recommendation now,” he said.

Meanwhile, of the roughly 2,400 computers that had been disbursed last year when schools closed their doors, about 100 have yet to be returned to the district. Harris said for a large portion of those computers, the district knows why they haven’t been returned yet.

Ryan Bahten, the district’s director of information network services, said he had also received calls from teachers and students who have been getting messages that the device had been stolen.

Documents

• August Budget Revision

 

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