Surprisingly, the district has good finances at the moment despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Principal Francis Rojas said in a Zoom interview. The increased expenditure on software for distance learning has been offset by savings for things the school is not doing, such as field trips and college visits, Rojas continued .
Another reason Rojas cited for the school district doing fairly well is the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act. The school district has used the money given through the CARES Act to provide free lunch to all students, and any children in the community since March, Rojas added.
The California state legislature has received around 1.5 billion dollars from the federal government under this act to “support nutrition services and a competitive grant program to support and expand existing community schools,” according to the NCSL (National Conference of State Legislators).
“[The school budget] has been offset by savings on things that we aren’t doing because we’re not in person,” Rojas said. “We didn’t print the student handbook this year. Everything’s online so the thousands of dollars it cost to print course catalogs and student handbooks were saved this year,” Rojas said. “We are depending on Aeries for report cards. All the postage, it’s tens of thousands of dollars. We also decided this year we would not offer the PSAT 10 to 10th graders.”
Teacher salaries have also stayed the same, but not because of the pandemic, according to Rojas. Teacher salaries have not been frozen, but rather the bargaining agreement negotiated between the teachers’ union and district is set to expire soon, and they are currently renegotiating the terms, Rojas said. During this transition period, both the union and district have agreed that salaries will remain the same until another deal is made, Rojas added.
Regarding various departments at MHS, “Every department has a department budget that we normally offer,” Rojas said. “I have not cut that budget at all. We did have a major cut two years ago to a science budget, so I had to figure out how to reallocate funds so that this year we could increase the science budget and that’s how we were able to invest in Labster, an online program that allows students to complete science labs virtually,” he said.
The Art Department’s budget has not increased, Rojas said. However, the department was able to purchase more consumables such as clay for the ceramics class for student-at-home usage due to the department being able to use the surplus funds the art department already had available to them, Rojas added.
“Other departments are able to continue with what they have; the other things are just schoolwide, like Nearpod,” Rojas said. “I think it was arts and science [that were given more funds] because those have consumables that students use; we’re able to increase or make sure there was ample allocation of money,” Rojas added.
Regarding the prospect of returning to in-person school, he avoided investing tens of thousands of dollars in desk shields and other items in the event that the school may not even use them, Rojas said. Comparing desk shields to the hoarding of toilet paper, he did not want to take action too early without confidence on how the situation will unfold, Rojas said.
“The high school in general has done really well at trying to get us tools that will work and help us,” science teacher Letta Meyer said in a Zoom interview. “[Teachers] went to Mr. Rojas and Miss Gross, and said, ‘Hey, [Nearpod] is a great tool, can we look into this?’ And they went and looked, figured out how to maneuver things around so they could get us Nearpod.”
While she did invest in some items for herself like a tablet that she could use to write on the virtual whiteboard, it was not a big deal financially, and she is not worried about funds during the distance learning period, Meyer said.She recently obtained funding through Donorschoose.org in order to purchase lab kits for her AP Chemistry students so as not to stress the school budget, Meyer said.
“We have to make sure that we’ve got a lot of different things and programs that are running at the school that do cost money, and so we look for other places where we can get other things donated,” Meyer said.
The band department usually goes on frequent trips to marching band competitions and performances, which cost a lot of money, Band Director Moises Fagundes said in a Zoom interview.
“A big part of our finances, especially this first half of the year, is marching band, and with that not really happening, we don’t have to pay for competitions or buses or food, a lot of the expenses we normally would have to pay,” Fagundes said. “The biggest project I would say we’re doing right now is we have a lot of instruments that have probably not been repaired in a while, so we have budgeted some money to be able to repair and go through some of our instrument inventory and fix that.”
The district provided funding for MusicFirst, a software program that assesses band students’ playing skills, after band teachers requested the program, Fagundes said. The band department is in a pretty good spot, and while the school could always do more, what this district is doing currently, in terms of funding, is sufficient, Fagundes added.
In a normal year, the band department is usually self-sufficient, so it does not need much district help, Fagudes said. “I would say probably about five to ten percent of our needs are covered by the district and school, and then the rest is based off of donations, boosters, and fundraising,” Fagundes said. “The district has accounts that cover costs like transportation and things like that, and those are what we use [from the district].”
Computer science teacher Charles Castleman thinks that the school is doing just fine, and that the expenses are balancing out, Castleman said in a Zoom interview.
“We passed a school bond in 2018, measure AA, and that’s helped the situation,” Castleman said. “On the other hand, the pandemic has caused a huge hole in the budget this year, so that’s kind of had a negative effect.”
While there was a huge decline in revenue this year because of the lockdowns, along with California going from a surplus to a large deficit, the concerns about school funding cuts ended up being overblown, Castleman said. The school had a meeting about the financial situation in the summer to discuss concerns, but it all worked out in the end, Castleman added.
Teachers have mostly just been paying for small out-of-pocket expenses to accommodate the move to distance learning, English teacher Sejee Kim said in a Zoom interview. She bought some things, like a desk lamp, more storage space for her books, as well as an upgraded family WiFi plan to be able to teach from home, Kim added.
However, she doesn’t think she or any of her colleagues have been affected financially by distance learning, Kim said. “I do have other teacher-friends that have spent more on home office furniture and equipment to better teach from at home,” Kim said. “It kinda is a personal choice, although it is used for work purposes,” she said.
The way the district gets money from the state is by attendance, math teacher Annie Nguyen said in a Zoom interview. The Wednesday schedule with advisory is currently in place so that the school can get funding, Nguyen added. Attendance has not changed much, so the income from that area is mostly the same, Nguyen continued.
As for the Math department, “the biggest thing is not financial,” Nguyen said. “The biggest support that I got from the principal is that he hears our concerns and is trying to be supportive of us.”
She and other math teachers wanted the district to buy the software GoGuardian that would allow them to see screens of students’ personal computers, Nguyen said. While Principal Rojas was supportive of the purchase, the district was unable to buy it due to the cost, Nguyen said. The Math Department currently relies on Chromebooks for secure testing, Nguyen added.
“I think this is a very difficult situation,” Castleman said. “A lot of schools really have done very few hours. I’ve heard stories from other school districts where they end at 12:30 and where the instructional minutes have gone down a lot. Based on the kind of things I’ve heard from teacher-friends at other districts, it does make me glad that I’m working here because I think that we’ve managed to handle the situation and been able to provide pretty close to the same number of instructional minutes as before.”