Warmest Wishes for a wonderful Christmas.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and is ready for the Christmas season. At this time we have completed many of our demographics reports and eligibility updates using the 2014 school year data. The trends show a continued improvement as the State slowly continues to recover from the recession. The biggest item on our minds right now is the future of the State Building Program. I believe a new program will begin to take shape as soon as January when the governor releases his budget proposal for the 2015/16 fiscal year.

The new plan will likely result in several scenarios that need to be analyzed for every district we work with. As with any changes, there will be those who benefit and those that may end up with less funding than anticipated. Even if the amount of funding doesn't change, we will need to try to determine the timeline for any proposed funding. The State has been spending about $1 to $1.5 billion per year to assist schools with their facility needs. However, there is already a backlog of that much in applications submitted to OPSC so if the new plan is to make annual allocations to the State building program, the first year's proceeds will be needed for the projects in line already.

Our message has been to make sure if you are eligible for funding to get your application in line. Once any new information is available we will be ready to help you understand the pros and cons of any proposals. At this time, January is just around the corner as the holidays will be upon us shortly.

Congratulations to all the school districts that successfully passed their local bonds in November. We assisted several districts with facility master plans to help prepare for the bond campaign. Most of those were successful in their efforts while others are still in process for future bonds.

The SAB did have a short meeting on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving which was their last meeting of this calendar year. Our notes for that meeting are in this newsletter.

SchoolWorks will be attending the CSBA conference in San Francisco on December 14-16 and will be at the Superintendents Symposium in Monterey at the end of January. If you plan to be at either of these conferences, please stop by to visit our booth.

2014 CBEDS

For anyone who hasn't sent us the CBEDS or CALPADS data for 2014, be sure to get us your data so we can see what opportunities you have for facility funds either under the current program or under any new scenarios that we will analyze next year.

SAB Meeting Notes

The State Allocation Board held a brief meeting on November 25th.

There was one discussion/action item scheduled for this meeting regarding Livermore Valley and the Superior Courts finding that they did not meet the competitive bidding requirements on two of their previous projects. Since the District believed they were following the requirements at the time, and they agreed to modify their procedures to be in compliance for future projects, there was no action taken by the SAB to request any rescissions for their projects.

The SAB approved 5 projects for Charter schools which used up the remaining $89.9 million available in the Charter Facility categories. There were a total of 72 applications turned in for this Charter funding round. As has always happened previously, the demand exceeded the funding available.

There are now $393.1 million in processed projects that exceed bond authority. There are also $750.5 million in projects that have been received but not processed by OPSC. This results in a total of $1.14 billion in projects that exceed the current bond authority. This will likely create a significant backlog for the program once these applications need to be processed.

The next SAB meeting is scheduled for January 28th.

Final Notes

In planning for your future facility needs, the main items to be aware of include the demographics and enrollment projections, the age and condition of your facilities, additional facilities required to enhance the educational programs, and of course the available funds to address the facility needs.

We can assist with many of those items and work as a part of a team with district consultants. As soon as any new information on school facility funding is available, we look forward to working with you to take the steps necessary to make sure your facility projects can get the funding they are eligible for.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ken Reynolds

President

SchoolWorks