Ecker: 'We're Simply Operating Too Many Schools'

As the Fountain Valley School District faces a $2 million budget deficit—a deficit that could increase should the state cut an additional $1.5 billion on Dec. 15—and the possibility of closing one of its 11 campuses, local parents are looking for answers. What better place to get those answers than directly from Superintendent Mark Ecker?

Ecker sat down last week with Fountain Valley Patch to discuss the district's mounting financial woes, and to respond to readers' questions, concerns and suggestions.

Patch: What if the district redistributed the $375,000 cost savings as a cost cut to each school within the district?

Ecker: The premise that $375,000 is the magic bullet, that if we can offset that much we could prevent the closure of a school, is a false premise. That’s not how the funding goes; the schools don’t have any separate funding, that’s all been swept. Most of that money is categorical money and with the flexibility provisions that the state has, those have been swept already. The dollars that are allocated are paid by the district office on a ($4,800) per student basis.

Taking $37,000 away [from each school] would probably mean that every staff would lose half of a teacher, or maybe we don’t hire a custodian, or maybe we have a principal for every two schools. All of these things have already been taken into consideration. We’re simply operating too many schools.

There aren’t too many programs to cut. [Another option] would be cutting salaries across the board. We can do that but it’s negotiable, we need to negotiate that with our bargaining unit. We just can’t implement it. We may be forced to sit down and look at a 5 percent or 10 percent across the board pay cut for all employees.

There was a quote from a former district employee in which she said that the administrators were paid a little bit too much.

Let me address administrators. First of all, as administrators we’re always ready for this. This district several years ago when we were in good times made an effort to get its employees to the mean and above. We provided salary raises during those times over the period of two to three years. We brought teachers from the bottom to slightly below the mean, but as we got to the third or fourth phase of it, we got hit with [the recession].

The amount of administrative salaries, if we got rid of all of them, represents about 4 to 5 percent of the district budget. If you added in benefits, it would be slightly more. 

Our salaries are commissary. Let me discuss my own salary, because that became a topic. This is my 16th year as superintendent of this district, 40th year in public education. I am the most senior of 28 superintendents in terms of service on the job as a superintendent in Orange County. I teach in the graduate school of education at Cal State, training administrators. 

My salary has been negotiated over the course of 16 years. I’ve had other job offers at larger districts. My desire was to stay here and the board had an interest to keep me here. Do I feel like I’m making more money than I deserve or earn? No, I don’t.

What about a wage and benefit freeze for a year?

I think that’s a viable option. We have to be careful about that because of two things: First, it’s only for one year. So when a year goes by and you get into the next year, you’re not just bumping people up one year, but two. So that means a teacher on step five, a year later gets bumped up to step seven.

Second, it’s all negotiable. It cannot be implemented unless they change the law. So collective bargain-wise, I would have to have all the unions come down here and agree.

Instead of talking about cuts, what if the district solicited donations from philanthropists, private donors, and families?

There are only four non-offset ways that we can generate alternative revenue:

• Grants: Some are competitive and others are entitlements. Most of the grants are restrictive, but can offset the costs of projects and training.
• Surplus property, either sales or leases; we have been talking about that. The Fountain Valley School District has sold six or seven surplus properties. Four of those have been negotiated with the state allocation board to use the money in an unrestrictive manner.
• Parcel taxes or bonds: Bonds are restrictive. Parcel taxes would allow the district to have alternative revenue for a few years, but the voters would need to be in support of that. Many districts have done that.
• An educational foundation, which goes to the heart of donations. We have an educational foundation; they take donations to support certain things and set certain goals. These suggestions by many people, I would ask if they were members of the foundation and if they are interested in serving on the board or attending, just being more involved. They’re not a big foundation, but they do raise money.

What if the district moved its offices into some of the empty classrooms? This way it could use the empty school space for administration and rent out the current district building.

This district office is 38,000 square feet, 19,000 on each floor. We purchased this bulding for $5.7 million from the money we received when we sold our old district office for $25 million. We currently occupy all of the space on the bottom plus we occupy 8,000 square feet on top. In addition to the business office, we also have the tech training lab and foundation office.

That leaves 11,000 square feet to lease. Of that, 3,000 is leased out while another 4,000 is empty, but we receive leasing income because the company went bottom up and had to pay off the lease for the next year. And the rest is not leased. We’re looking for tenants.

Secondly, there’s no place that can house all of these facilities. I can’t even imagine where business division, which works closely with personnel division, could find enough space at another school to do that.

The hope that on the short term we would lease out this whole building, I don’t think you would find any economist who would look you straight in the eye and think you’re serious.

One commenter suggested merging school districts.  What are your thoughts on that?

I think it’s a good idea. I’m in favor of that. What I haven’t figured out is how to do it without starting a war. Fountain Valley has tried to unify three times over our history. It’s pretty bloody.

The process required is that you need to meet certain criteria and bring it up to a vote. We tried to unify within city bounds, our school district bounds, by taking over Fountain Valley High, and the teachers at the school fought it vehemently because they thought they were going to lose money. The community and their administration fought it. There are all these different school districts—K-5, K-6, K-12—and that leads to inequitably of funds. I think we could run more efficiently if we eliminated thousands of those school districts.

We tried to create a larger district with the other smaller districts. But it’s just like the deficit panel; no one wants to give up their turf. We almost lost our neck; there was blood.

What about convening a committee to come up with cost-saving alternatives?

We’ve done it already. In fact, (former Assistant Superintendent for Business Paul Burkhart) did that the last time. We invited the community and the employees to come up with ideas. Some of them were a little ridiculous, but a lot of them we incorporated. A lot of good ideas came out of that.

The committee that we used came up with these massive cuts. This notion that we need to start up a committee again? There are not a lot of places to cut.