Coronado Unified will be asking staff, parents and community members for feedback on the budget at an upcoming Oct. 9 workshop. Community members will also have the opportunity to share ideas before then.
The district is working to revise its San Diego County Office of Education approved 2024-25 budget moving forward.
“We’re all here,” said Deputy Superintendent Donnie Salamanca, “to come together as a community and understand where we are as a district and where we are with our fiscal challenges and respond to the task that we were given by the county office to identify budget solutions either through cuts or creative financing solutions.”
County letter
County education officials have told CUSD they will need to make $2.4 million in budget reductions by fiscal year 2026-27.
The district has an intentional plan to rapidly drain its reserve funds, or its “Long Range Plan ‘Bridge to Basic Aid,’” before becoming locally funded from property taxes. But multi-year projections concurrently fail to meet the required 3% in reserves of the budget total.
Now the county may intervene for further analysis of the adopted budget if the district’s First Interim Report submission in December does not show this progress.
During the first committee meeting on Sept. 18, which reviewed and discussed CUSD’s last school year finances, Salamanca told the community he is looking to engage shareholders on Oct. 9 to inform the district about identified priorities at the next board meeting on Oct. 17.
“Think about programs that you are concerned about and our idea for the next meeting is we’re going to have opportunities to kind of unpack some of the various scenarios. We’re going to have an opportunity for a gallery walk…,” said Salamanca.
While attendees were asked to complete the following form at the meeting, https://bit.ly/3pA55R6, the general public can reach out to the district using the following form: https://forms.gle/Hd9A312aF67BVxB38.
