Update: Fresno Unified approves $2.3 billion budget. Here’s how the money will be spent
UPDATE JUNE 22: The Fresno Unified board of trustees voted 6-0 Wednesday night to adopt the proposed 2023-24 budget, worth over $2.3 billion dollars, with little discussion. Board president Veva Islas was absent for the vote.
ORIGINAL STORY:
Fresno Unified trustees are weighing a 2023-2024 budget that tops $2 billion.
The district’s total proposed budget is estimated at $2,316,615,845 – an increase of just under $300 million from the 2022-23 school year.
Trustees will vote Wednesday on whether to adopt the budget that’s almost half a billion dollars larger than the entire city of Fresno’s plan for the 23-24 fiscal year.
“The budget is how the superintendent and the board demonstrate their educational priorities for the next year,” said the district’s interim chief financial officer Patrick Jensen in an interview with The Bee’s Education Lab.
Some of the top priorities include the social-emotional and physical health of students, campus safety, and facilities improvements, he said.
With this budget, the district is also expecting to spend the last of the roughly $770 million it received in additional one-time pandemic recovery funding from both the state and federal government.
About a third of the district’s remaining $245 million in that funding will go toward HVAC upgrades, Jensen said. The rest is largely allocated toward social emotional support spaces, completing the new Farber campus for alternative education, and increased instructional support.
Most of the budget covers employee salaries and benefits
The lion’s share of the Fresno Unified budget – or roughly 80% of its costs, according to Jensen – is set aside for employee salary and benefits. That’s typical of public school budgets across the United States.
Specifically, over $555 million will cover salaries for certificated staff like teachers, counselors, school psychologists, and registered nurses – a roughly 4% increase from the 2022-23 school year.
Another $211 million goes toward the salaries of classified staff in an almost 13% boost from the previous year. Classified staff include a range of positions, from bus drivers and custodians to paraprofessionals and office assistants.
More than $480 million in the budget draft are earmarked for these and other employees’ benefits, representing an over 17% jump.
This budget will also cover the hiring of dozens of additional staff across departments.
Special education is getting the equivalent of 19 additional full-time staff in a mix of full-time and part-time roles. That includes more guidance learning advisors and behavior support advisors.
It also allocates $13 million’s worth of added teaching staff to help reduce class sizes at elementary schools and in ninth grade English classrooms. Reduced class sizes is one of many investments the Fresno Teachers Association has pushed for over the past year in its contract talks with the district, which will continue over the summer.
The district is planning to add school nurses, campus safety assistants, a Hmong translator, and dozens of other positions that staff, students, and parents have advocated for in recent months.
Fresno Unified investing in HVAC improvements, school safety
Another large portion of the budget will go toward building improvements – an almost $232 million chunk, in fact.
That’s more than four times the roughly $54 million Fresno Unified spent on building improvements this past school year – or an almost 329% increase.
The bulk of that will help replace “aging” HVAC units at schools, Jensen said, to improve air quality in the wake of the pandemic.
The district’s delayed spending on air filtration units and the quality of this equipment were called into question in a February 2022 Fresno Bee investigation.
The remaining dollars allocated for building improvements will go toward a facility for the district’s eLearn Academy – which saw its enrollment swell from dozens of students to thousands during the pandemic – and configuring more spaces for students to meet with the growing ranks of social-emotional support staff, Jensen said.
“When a lot of schools were built in the 1950s or 60s, you didn’t typically have that level of social-emotional supports on a school campus,” he said. “So a lot of our older buildings and older campuses just don’t have this confidential space for a school psychologist to sit and meet with a kid.”
Other social-emotional investments include funding for additional counselors, child welfare and attendance specialists, social workers, and other personnel, totaling about $4 million.
In the area of safety, the budget also includes $1.3 million that will fund the purchase of additional radios, cameras, and vaping sensors, as well as evaluations of safe routes to schools and other investments.
Another area of increased spending is with regard to student literacy. The district has convened a literacy task force in response to the district’s poor performance in statewide assessments last year – which demonstrated only about a third of its students read at or above the state standard.
The district has committed $100 million to that program over five years, Jensen said. More specific allocations of the first year of funding will be determined as the task force finalizes its recommendations, pending feedback from principals and teachers in the coming weeks.
The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab at its website.
This story was originally published June 20, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
