GUSD expects more revenue during 2016-17 fiscal year
Glendale Unified officials anticipate $20 million more in revenue during the next fiscal year, but with rising employee retirement costs, they still point to caution.
The district expects to receive $214 million in revenue in fiscal 2016-17, according to Robert McEntire, chief business and financial officer for Glendale Unified.
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But even with the uptick, school officials are perhaps most concerned with paying more each year into two state retirement systems for public employees and teachers.
“Even at full funding under the governor’s plan, we’re going to fall short of 30% of our purchasing power compared to where we were in 2007-08,” McEntire said.
By 2021, Glendale Unified will be contributing 19% of its budget into the state’s teacher retirement system — or roughly $20 million, compared with the $8.5 million it paid into the same system, California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, in 2013-14.
By the 2016-17 fiscal year, the district will pay $7 million more than it did three years ago into the Public Employee Retirement System, or CalPERS, for its employees who are not teachers, such as secretaries and maintenance workers.
“For every $100 we pay a staff member, we’re going to eventually pay almost $20 toward their retirement, and so it’s important to recognize that this growth is very much eating into the funding increases,” McEntire said.
2016-17 will mark the third consecutive fiscal year in which the state has not made cuts to education, but McEntire estimates that Glendale Unified has sustained about $270 million in funding losses since 2008-09, the height of the recession.
For school board President Christine Walters, the several-year losses are a critical reminder when the district is seeing increased revenue year-to-year.
“We keep saying we’re getting more money,” she said, “but it’s easy to forget we’re comparing to the prior year, and we spent a lot of years getting less money and significantly less money, so that to remind people that we’re digging back out is an important reminder.”
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Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com
Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
