The Math Behind the Small Pie
Last week I wrote about the teachers who stood up at the podium and described, in plain and often painful terms, what it's like to work in this district right now — the heat waves with no AC, the second jobs, the health premiums climbing 23% on a frozen salary schedule. I said then that everyone in that room, on both sides of the table, is arguing over how to divide a budget that's too small to begin with. I want to make that case with numbers this time, because once you actually open PVPUSD's 2025-26 Unaudited Actuals, the argument stops being a talking point and starts being arithmetic.
Before I get into the budget, I want to be unambiguous about one thing: the teachers who spoke last week are right. They deserve higher pay, and our community's expectations for a high-quality education depend on being able to recruit and keep excellent teachers — expectations we can't hold with a straight face if we're not willing to pay for them. Nothing that follows is an argument against that. It's an argument about where the money to actually deliver it has to come from, and about the fact that we shouldn't have to choose between fair pay and a functioning school when the real fix is demanding the state finally fund PVPUSD equitably.
Start with the Unrestricted General Fund — the checking account the district actually has discretion over. Total spending for 2025-26 came in at $150.84 million. Of that, $129.04 million, or 86%, is already salary and benefits, once you count certificated salaries, classified salaries, employee benefits, and the district's contribution to Special Education, which is itself almost entirely staffing costs. That leaves $21.8 million, or about 14%, for everything else: instructional materials, textbooks, custodial and maintenance services, utilities, insurance, the routine restricted maintenance contribution that keeps our buildings from falling apart — literally everything that isn't a paycheck.
You can't redirect that 14% toward a meaningful raise without affecting school operations. It's already the thin margin that keeps the lights on, the classrooms supplied, and the roofs patched. And it's thin enough that the numbers on the table right now make the point on their own: the district's own figures put the cost of a single 1% ongoing salary increase for all employees at roughly $1.18 million a year. The gap between the district's latest offer — a 3% ongoing raise for 2026-27 — and the union's counter of 3.75% plus a one-time payment is more than a philosophical difference. It's several million dollars, coming out of a fund that has barely any slack in it.
Even with that margin held tight, the district still ran a $1.69 million deficit for the year — this after actual revenue came in $1.25 million better than the operating budget projected. That's worth sitting with: a bit of good news on the revenue side, and the district still finished in the red. Part of the reason is one most districts run into eventually — extra revenue that shows up mid-year is often one-time money, a block grant or a timing adjustment, not a permanent addition to the base. Ongoing salaries and benefits don't care whether the money that arrived was one-time or recurring; the paycheck goes out either way. A one-time bump can soften a deficit. It can't close a structural one. There is no hidden slush fund. There is no line item we've simply failed to notice. We are, by the numbers, maxed out — and the district's own projected ending reserve for the year, at 8.38%, is itself a one-time cushion, not new revenue.
I know how that sounds to some ears on the dais: fatalistic, an excuse dressed up as fiscal responsibility. I've heard the response before, in one form or another — that if everyone just keeps negotiating in good faith, keeps showing up, keeps trusting the process, a fair deal will eventually emerge. I don't doubt anyone's good faith. I think most people at that table, on both sides, mean exactly what they say. But good faith doesn't care about cold hard numbers. You can bargain in the most good-faith room in California and still only be dividing that 14%, because good faith doesn't create revenue — it just decides how the shortage gets distributed. At some point the question isn't whether people are negotiating honestly. It's whether they're negotiating over a number that was never big enough to answer the question in front of them. Even the state's own cost-of-living adjustment for next year — 2.87%, plus another 1.44% earmarked specifically for the new paid pregnancy disability leave requirement — tells you how little room the formula itself leaves before anyone starts talking about a raise beyond it.
So where does the real money come from? Not from squeezing 14% harder. It comes from the fact that PVPUSD receives roughly $4,500 less per student than the state average under California's LCFF formula — a gap that works out to something like $45 million a year we simply don't receive, for reasons that have nothing to do with how well we run this district and everything to do with how Sacramento wrote the formula over a decade ago. Forty-five million dollars is not a rounding error against a $150 million unrestricted budget. It's not “a little more room” to be generous. It's more than double the entire non-salary discretionary budget of this district, every single year, indefinitely. If PVPUSD received funding closer to our fair per-pupil share, we would not be having a conversation about whether a COLA-matching raise is affordable. We would be having a conversation about how quickly we can offer one.
This is why I keep coming back to the idea that a school board's job isn't only to manage the budget it's handed — it's to fight for a better one. Every hour this board spends debating whether we can afford a 2.5% raise instead of a 3.75% raise is an hour not spent building the coalition of underfunded districts that could actually move Sacramento on the LCFF formula. Every board meeting where "fiscal responsibility" is offered as the final word, instead of the honest first sentence in a longer answer, is a meeting where we quietly accept a $45 million annual shortfall as simply the weather, rather than a policy choice that can be challenged.
I'm not naive about how hard that fight is, or how long it takes. State funding formulas don't move because one district's board sends a strongly worded letter. They move because districts organize, build sustained pressure over multiple budget cycles, and refuse to let legislators treat "structurally underfunded" as a permanent condition rather than a solvable problem. That's slower and less satisfying than a single dramatic board vote. It is also the only version of this fight that actually grows the pie instead of just rearranging the same $21.8 million every negotiation cycle.
The teachers who spoke last week are right that the current deal isn't good enough. They're also, whether they'd put it this way or not, pointing at the correct target: not each other, not the district's negotiating team, not a school board that's managing a shortfall it didn't create — but a funding formula in Sacramento that has never been seriously challenged by this board. I want a board that treats that fight as core business, not an afterthought squeezed in around budget season. Because until PVPUSD gets its fair share, every raise we offer will keep coming out of the same 14%, and every teacher who loves this district will keep being asked to prove their worth against a number that was never big enough in the first place.
