After more closely analyzing her position paper - “How to Balance the Long Term Budget – Because we are the Smiths – Not the Joneses,” I have found 15 different errors or false assumptions that there to be no feasible way it could work. The idea of this plan balancing the school district’s budget and being better for our schools is entirely false and misleading. I would provide a link to this paper, but it has since been taken down. In the interest of transparency that she and her supporters demand of the district, I hope in this same spirit of transparency she would repost that paper as a statement of her ideas and not just something she posted as a campaign hook to get elected. Because there are so many points, errors, and falsehoods to address in this plan, this will be the first part in a three part series.
Of note, she did not mention state pension reform once. With her Doctorate and Masters in education, did she not know the state’s pension problem or did she decide to hide her position from the voters until after the election to throw a wrench into any parcel tax vote? If your platform as a school board member of an elementary school district is to now fix California’s $176 billion pension debt and you kept this in your pocket as a candidate, then you essentially deceived and mislead voters. If you knew or perceived the district’s pension liability to be a problem, then how come it was not presented in your plan?
Back to her plan, in the first of her three points on how to balance the long term budget, she is “going to negotiate with the teachers union to reduce their salary and benefits percentage of the budget down from 89% to 82% over the next five years.” I am not sure any employee any where would be excited to hear that is the first point in your plan. Nor is it reasonable to expect they to be an employee for very long which leads to a whole another set of issues she either failed, ignored, or forgot to cite. She actually wants to take that 82% down to 81% taking an additional 1% and having the teachers union set it aside for the “inevitable recession.” Let me see… you are going to take another 1% out of my paycheck I use for my family, for food, rent and other personal use and put it in another benefits plan for me for some recession?
First point of clarification is having their own 1% benefits plan is not something our teachers union does or has the facilities set up to do. While it sounds simple in theory, what it amounts to is the teachers setting up their own benefit plan with its own implementation and administrative complexities and costs. This plan would require not only a third party administrator, but a third party asset manager and legal counsel to design the benefits which would need to include such legal aspects of “what constitutes a recession and therefore plan distributions and how those distributions would be equitable determined.” Another example would be, what happens when a teacher leaves the district? If part of their earned benefits went into the plan, would they get those back? Assuming the plan is invested, it’s not a straight dollar for dollar transfer, there is an earnings component as well. Is Caroline planning on the district picking up these administration costs so adding to its own administration costs and drain on resources or is it to be expected the teachers absorb these extra administration costs thereby reducing this perceived 1% benefit to say 0.75% not including the thousands of dollars in startup costs and legal fees to get a plan like this in place. This is a small point compared to her other assumptions.
The backbone of her plan is based off of erroneous data and therefore her erroneous conclusion that “the average salary and benefits percentage of other local district budgets is 82% and that this is not a novel plan but one used by the Fremont Union High School District which has a similar policy in place that has fostered employee-board harmony.” Nowhere in this paper were any references cited so there is no way for the voter or her constituents to verify this; however, based on the best information I found available both of these conclusions are wrong.
In looking at the data available, the closest match to her assumptions seems to be from EdData (www.ed-dat.org) which is a California Department of Education website with information on all K-12 California schools. If that is the data she used, and again we don’t know because no references were cited, the first problem in her calculations are those budget numbers are from 2014 and she is comparing them to Menlo Park’s numbers from 2016. This is like comparing 1950 to 2000 on a smaller scale. Why is this a problem? Because as we know that since the state passed the California Pension Reform Act in 2013 the cost and expenses across the entire state have gone up significantly since then. If she were to cite Menlo Park’s actual 2014 numbers, she would she would see our salary and benefits expenses were 83% of total expenses well within the average range of the neighboring districts she is comparing us to throwing the most critical part of her plan for Menlo Park’s numbers to get in line immediately out the window.
Even so, how exactly did she get to that 82% average? Because the fact checking and rebuttal to her paper would be longer than her paper, stay tuned for the next installment…
