RICHMOND — After decades of financial ups and downs, West Contra Costa Unified School District’s new superintendent has laid out a 90-day fiscal stabilization plan that aims to get to the root of the district’s issues and develop solutions while bringing the public in on the conversation.
More than a dozen meetings are scheduled to take place across the district between September and December, all focused on diving deeper into the district’s financial woes, goals for the future and how to make those hopes come to fruition.
The meetings are part of a fiscal stabilization plan, a core focus for the district’s new leader, Superintendent Cheryl Cotton, who presented the plan to trustees during a meeting Wednesday night.
“Together, we will maintain both control of our district decisions and our district budget. That is our goal,” Cotton said. “Communication through this process is key. Transparency, efficiency, and accountability are all requirements of organizational change.”
The plan is divided into sessions, the first being an assessment of the budget with staff and community input. Once that process concludes mid-September, attention through mid-October will turn toward analyzing the root causes of the district’s budget problems and potential impacts.
Actionable goals will then be discussed and studied through early November, followed by a focus on what strategies would need to be employed to implement those goals.
Discussions on those topics will be held evenings in the libraries on the Hercules, Richmond and El Cerrito high school campuses. Tentative dates have been scheduled but not yet finalized. Each meeting will also be held virtually.
“I’m filled with gratitude for the number of meetings and the amount of community outreach. There’s a lot of people who are going to be out of the house a lot of nights,” board President Leslie Reckler said.
How future meeting details are communicated and to whom was a key concern for trustees who asked that things like maps be included for families who may be unfamiliar with different campuses as well as a list of terms to help people better understand the conversation.
Trustees also requested that other bodies like parent advisory groups and city councils be looped into what have been tough conversations in the district.
“We have a greater community that’s also invested that we don’t necessarily reach,” Trustee Guadalupe Enllana said.
District leadership have had to make hard financial decisions in recent years. Faced with a substantial budget deficit and concerns from the Contra Costa County Office of Education, district trustees adopted a fiscal solvency plan that called for $32.7 million in reductions to be made.
In keeping with the plan, $19 million in budget cuts were approved ahead of the 2024-25 school year and another $7 million in cuts were approved before the 2025-26 school year. An additional $6 million in reductions are expected to occur before the next school year.
Cuts have sparked strong pushback from the community who shared fears already underserved students would be the most harmed and students in general would lose beloved teachers and access to electives and special programs.
Had the budget reductions not been made, the district risked losing local control to the county Office of Education, warned Associate Superintendent of Business Services Kim Moses, then acting as interim superintendent following the retirement of Ken Hurst.
Control was previously lost to the state in 1990 due to the district’s financial instability. Then known as the Richmond Unified, the district took on a $29 million loan from the state that kept schools open and was eventually fully paid off in 2012.
Stabilizing the district’s current budget and preventing future takeovers will take buy-in and support from the whole community, Cotton said.
“We must all support the efforts to stabilize our district’s financial position,” Cotton said. “Sharing responsibility and accountability will be the drivers for change.”