- We welcome your participation and attendance at our board meeting.
- As we approach the end of Quarter 3, there’s lots of great news to share:
- We invite students, staff, and community to visit Sweetwater’s Art Exhibition at the South Chula Vista Library through April 9. The library is full of all various art forms from middle and high school students across the district and you’ll be amazed. Last Friday evening, several student artists were recognized. Best of Show
- 3rd Place: Mikel Gonzalez – SYH
- 2ndPlace: Julianna Pantoja – ORH
- 1st Place Best of Show: Fernanda Escalona – CVH
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- This past weekend, we hosted the State Robotics Middle & High School Championships. Over 120 teams competed with some traveling from north LA County. RDR, NCM, ORH, SYH, and Palomar represented Sweetwater UHSD in the state finals. RDR Team 6446A, Coach Kirk Braito won the “Create Award” and ORH Team 507C,Coaches Chad Pearson & Che Nevarez won the HS “Create Award.”
- We also had many of our schools participate in the FIRST Robotics Regional Competition held at the Del Mar Arena –HH FRC 7441, Coach Angel Martinez; MoH FRC 4616,Coach Bernardo Escobedo; SoH FRC 5627, Coach Hector Arias won the “Team Spirit Award”; SUHI FRC 3704, Coach Hiram Villafana; ELH FRC 2543, Coach Joel Foust won the “Safety Award.” Congratulations to FIRST and VEX Robotics teams.
- Several of our students will be recognized March 13th at a Sweetwater Authority Reception for the Photo Contest they sponsored to help the community understand the importance of water through photography. Congratulations to the following winners: Kassandra Vogel, Reyna Perez – CVH; Raul Dotta, D’Angelo Genis – CPH; Airyl Van Dayrit – SUHI; Heduardo Suchilt – HH; Kaityln Werner, Kristine Emily Leonor, Alexis Guevara, Max Manson, Anne Piling – BVH.
- I am happy to announce 2019’s Sweetwater Teachers of the Year: Julio Avasan – OLH, Cheryl Bayley – ELH, Brian Dougherty – BVM, Don Dumas – BVH, Robert Manroe – CPH. We wish them the best as they proceed to the San Diego County Teachers of the Year competition. These teachers represent all other teachers in Sweetwater demonstrating the quality of teachers across the district who serve our students. Good Luck!
- Congratulations to John Czajkowski, Dr. Joe Fulcher, Sonia Picos, Manny Rubio who were selected by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the “Excellence in the Pursuit of Justice Award” as a result of their work on educating/informing our students on the topic of border drug smuggling, and their contribution to the Department of Justice mission. They will be recognized in late March at a special ceremony downtown. We thank you for your work!
- Tonight, Dr. Salkeld, our CFO, and I will share the Fiscal Stabilization Plan, which really is our recovery plan to achieve fiscal solvency. Dr. Salkeld will also report on our 2nd Interim Budget. As we have mentioned many times to many groups, the budget reports are always a “point in time” based upon the best information we have at that point in time. With each interim report, the budget is adjusted to account for actual expenditures and revenues from July 2018 to the date of the interim. If you have reviewed the agenda, you noticed that our budget shortfall for the current 2018-19 school year has decreased more than half from $10.5M to $4.9M which is 1% of our budget, and the projected deficit for 2019-20 school year has also significantly decreased by just under a half from $42.4M to $22.5M which is 4.5% of our budget. This happened because of the budget solutions we are implementing now and have implemented since October of 2018. First, let me mention, that above all, we identified budget solutions that would have the least impact on students and the classroom. Specifically, the budget solution I’m referring to from October is the Supplemental Early Retirement Plan, also known as the SERP. We thank our Board who said we could move forward with the SERP at mid-year which is highly unusual; we thank our labor partners who agreed to take it to their members; and, we appreciate our staff who are working to ensure we implement it well. Just offering an early retirement incentive does not ensure effective implementation. But, using an early retirement incentive, especially one offered mid-year, can help right-size a district that has experienced declining enrollment without resorting to layoffs. An early retirement incentive allows staff who are on the higher end of the salary schedule to voluntarily retire as opposed to laying off staff who are on the lower end of the salary schedule. We have a little over 4,000 employees and 332, or about 8% of Sweetwater employees have or will take advantage of the SERP by June 2019. If we had to lay off staff, we would have needed to layoff over 400 of our newer staff to provide the same cost savings as the veteran staff who retired.
- How does this help going forward into 2019-20? You will hear in the 2nd Interim report tonight that we are projected to decline in enrollment for the next two years. As we strategically implement the impact of the SERP, it will allow us to right-size our staff based upon student enrollment using our Position Control Committee that we have in place that ensures all new or unfilled positions are actually accounted for in our budget before we hire a new person or fill a current vacant position.
- You also might have heard that we did issue notices to some of our management team, including all assistant principals. This action was taken for two reasons: 1) it is an education code requirement that if a certificated staff member may be reassigned to a different position, they must be noticed by March 15th; 2) since this process takes time to inform staff and to complete the paperwork, and since the budget solutions had not been approved by the Board yet, we needed to take this action in an abundance of caution. No final decisions have been made. In fact, if there is a need to reduce any of the assistant principal positions, we have a task force of principals/assistant principals who are currently developing an equity-based resource allocation formula that will be used to guide those decisions, if necessary. During this budget year, our intent with all employees – teachers, counselors, classified staff, management – is to right-size our district using the SERP and other budget solutions, and not layoffs. This approach has been supported by our Board of Trustees and we are grateful to our labor partners for working together with us on this budget solution specifically. Too often school districts rely on layoffs of staff to create savings. Our beliefs and our culture don’t believe this is the best solution and, if considered, only as a last resort. As you will find in the information being shared tonight, the SERP has created a significant amount of savings to the district that have resulted in nearly $6.5M just for this current year’s budget – a number far greater than we had anticipated because of the actual number of employees who took advantage of the SERP.
- This right-sizing has also created an increase in our overall cash flow and a decrease of over $2M per month in our payroll since December.
- And, tonight we will share we have made significant positive steps towards reducing borrowing from our internal funds. At the 1st Interim presentation in December, there was a potential balance of approximately $42M in borrowing from Fund 49. If you recall Fund 49 is our Mello Roos funds. Since January of 2019, there has been no interfund borrowing and we are on schedule to bring down this balance from the projected $42M to approximately $8M by June. Given the direction of our overall savings, we anticipate that $8M could be even lower in our final adopted budget in late June.
- As I shared at the last board meeting, addressing our fiscal distress is compared more to running long distance than running a sprint. We have been persistent in our work and in finding viable solutions that have the least impact to students and the classroom; and, we are confident by the end of this school year, we will bring forward a balanced budget to our Board of Trustees and the Sweetwater community. There are many lessons to be learned; and being an educational institution, learning matters. During difficult times, we want to demonstrate to our students, our staff, and our community that no matter the challenges, we will work collaboratively to arrive at successful solutions. In the words of Maya Angelou, “ We may encounter many defeats (in life). But we must not be defeated.” Sweetwater is moving forward together because we are stronger than the storm.
- Finally, last week we hosted our first Suicide Prevention Community Forum. It was planned by a task force that includes staff, students, and community partners. As we know, suicide is a topic that is not commonly discussed; however, as part of our focus on student emotional well-being, we are creating opportunities for students, staff, families and community partners to come together and have conversations on the topic of teenage suicide. Over 150 students, families, and staff, along with community mental health partners spent a powerful 2 hours sharing information and personal stories. Everyone who attended thought we need to offer future opportunities. We want to thank psychologist Margaret Sedor, Student Services Director Sonia Picos and her staff, and our student board representative Brenna Pangelinan for their work to make that forum happen. So, tonight, I want to close with a public service announcement our Communications office created for the forum. Click here to see it. You’ll recognize the narrator’s voice!
- 2018-19_Second_Interim_Financial_Presentation-1 – PDF
- K-4_2019-20_Fiscal_Stabilization_Plan – PDF
- Thank you for the opportunity to serve you!