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Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation to provide additional revenue to to offset the impact from its enrollment of students residing in . The governor signed Senate Bill 119 on July 11, 1979(!). This was reported in the Albany Times on Wednesday, July 18, 1979 (see the PDF to the right).
The passage of time and the accompanying turnover of staff and school board members have resulted in the loss of institutional memory of the fact that the presence of University Village in town has financially benefited Albany for more than 33 years.
The Times article states that the bill was written by Senator Nicholas Petris, who represented Albany at that time, and was lobbied for extensively by the Albany Unified School District school board and then-Superintendent Charles McCully. The article particularly names then-board members and for making many trips to Sacramento to meet with Senator Petris and to lobby actively for passage of the bill.
The bill established Section 42950-42950.4 of the California Education Code. The section allows any school district which, in 1977-78, had “1) not less than 10 per cent of its enrollment living in residence facilities operated by the University of California for the use of university students and their families and 2) reported at least 15 different languages,” to increase its revenue limit (State per student revenue) by an amount tied to a countywide tax that was eliminated by the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.
As originally written, the bill would have benefited school districts at each of the UC campuses. However, Peggy Thomsen, now a , recalls that that would have cost more than the legislature was willing to appropriate. The bill’s language was narrowed to include only districts impacted by non-English speaking children of university students. As anticipated when the bill was adopted, Albany Unified was the only district that qualified.
The financial impact was reported as $176,000 for each of the 1977-78 and 1978-79 years. Given the language of the section, that impact was increased (or decreased) each following year by the change in total enrollment for AUSD and the change in per student revenue.
Originally, the amount was shown as an explicit adjustment in the state’s revenue limit calculation for AUSD. The district was not unique in receiving what would now be called an earmark. The tracking of the many (and increasing number of) earmarks as they affected various school districts across the state became a cumbersome process. At some time in the late 1980s, each district’s base revenue limit was indexed to simplify the revenue limit calculation while preserving the relative effect of each earmark.
It is impossible to know the law’s exact current financial impact without tracing through each of the 33 years of revenue limit calculations for AUSD. That would be a Herculean task. I have reached out without any success to , the state School Board Association and several education finance consultants to determine a reasonable estimate of the current impact.
The issue is complicated by the fact that there have been some efforts over the last 20 years to equalize revenue across school districts. It is not apparent what impact revenue equalization has had on Albany Unified. The fact that Albany currently receives more or less revenue per student than certain other school districts does not mean that the effects of Section 42950 have been eliminated. It only means that Albany and the other districts have received different earmark amounts over the years.
My estimate of the current impact of Section 42950 starts with enrollment. District enrollment in 1979 was 2,171. Enrollment reported in the 2011-12 Second Interim Financial Report was 3,802, growth of 75 percent.
(At some time since 1979, revenue limit calculation was changed from an enrollment basis to an attendance basis to provide school districts with an incentive to increase their attendance factors. Districts with above-average attendance factors benefit. I assume that AUSD has an average attendance factor.)
To reflect the increase in per student revenue, I used the Bay Area Consumer Price Index, which has increased by approximately 247 percent from 1979 to 2012. While tax revenues have lagged behind the CPI in recent years, Prop 98 and a number of other changes have caused education funding to rise faster than the CPI in other years.
It seems reasonable to use the CPI as a proxy for the revenue limit increase in the absence of some better estimate. Due to the state budget situation, the state only funded 80 percent of the base revenue limit in 2011-12. That funding shortfall also needs to be incorporated in the current impact estimate.
Applying the estimates of the increase in enrollment and the revenue per student, reduced by the funding limitation, suggests that Albany Unified received over $860,000 in 2011-12 due to the impact of Section 42950 of the education code.
This is about $883 per UC Village apartment, since there are 974 UC Village apartments. AUSD parcel tax yielded $714 per residential parcel in 2011-12.
This suggests that Section 42950 is providing approximately 23 percent more money per University Village unit than non-UC housing units provide. These funds have been received since 1979, eight years before Albany passed its first school parcel tax.
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Albany Patch welcomes guest columns and letters to the editor via email at albany@patch.com.
