I am one of five elected board members of the Hollister School District. I am not an educator, but a parent that successfully raised three children in the public schools of San Benito County. I am married to an educator, and we have two children just starting in the profession. I have other educators in my extended (but close) family.
The Hollister School District is the county’s largest educational system. We have 10 schools on eight sites and have about 5,300 enrolled students. We have over 550 employees. While we are not a business, any institution this size has to have some business-like practices. We definitely have the issues that any business has:
- We need growing revenues to cover growing expenses.
- We have to offer a quality product (great education and safety of students) that the customers (parents) will choose to purchase by enrolling their children.
- We have to attract talent to deliver a quality product.
- We have to meet regulatory requirements.
Revenues control what we can and cannot do. There are two drivers of our funding: how much the state allocates to public education overall and how the state divvies that up to each school district. Historically and currently, the governor plays around with the funding of schools in broad strokes, and then he and the legislature micro-manage how the funds are used. It’s a mess for us and all other school districts that has to be constantly navigated like ships deal with tides, waves, cross-currents, and wind.
The actual funds we receive is mostly driven by our average daily attendance. We have to enroll as many students as we can and also make sure they are in school every day. Challenges include when parents take their kids out of school for vacations or other non-health related reasons. When kids are not in school, we lose our funding for that child for those days, yet we still have to pay the teacher and other staff. Even more importantly, the absent children then fall behind the others academically.
Our expenses are primarily salaries and benefits, and within that group, teachers and site staff are the largest component. An entity the size of the Hollister School District requires expertise and experience in management, and we have expenses related to school district management too. The responsibilities of the administrators are huge, and just as important as the educators to a successful education system.
Despite all the new development in Hollister, our enrollment, our main revenue driver, is not growing. While we cannot determine exactly why, this board member’s intuition says that it is because residents are enrolling their students closer to their workplaces in Silicon Valley as they don’t like being 1.5 hours away from their children in bad traffic. Others may not have confidence in our schools and are enrolling them in other districts. These situations are a huge problem to overcome, but we are up to the challenge.
School board members are elected to lead, and I hope you will support your board members in doing so. If you have questions or comments, you can leave them here and I will see them.