Sacramento City Unified wants extra school days to avoid $47M fine for days lost during teacher strikes
SACRAMENTO — The Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) is considering adding 16 additional school days to avoid paying a $47 million fine from the teacher's strikes in 2022.
The district said the plan is to make up for learning loss. During the Spring 2022 teacher strikes over wages and budget cuts, schools were shut down for eight days.
Those eight days were never made up, so the state fined the district.
SCUSD has had that money sitting aside, ready to pay, but now it wants to add the extra days and invest the rest of the dollars back into where it was initially intended: the students.
"We're doing this because of mistakes past Sac City Unified leadership has made," said Nikki Milevsky, president of the Sacramento City Teacher's Association (SCTA).
Milevsky said the district's leaders back in 2022 claimed they were in a budget deficit and did not have the dollars to add extra days. It turns out they were in a surplus.
SCUSD said the decision not to add eight days back in June of 2022 had absolutely nothing to do with the budget or projected deficit. A spokesperson from there said they did not add the eight days back then because they could not reach agreement with SCTA on a plan that would ensure our schools were sufficiently staffed for meaningful instruction on those days.
"We were coming into last school year with $150 million sitting aside and the $47 million sitting on the side and designated for this fine," Milevsky said.
SCUSD and SCTA's recovery plan said it wants to invest the rest of the dollars into the students through things like smaller class sizes, support for struggling students and more aides in classrooms.
"Further improve our class sizes, have more support staff for our students and more learning time with them," Milevsky said.
Those types of investments are something most parents are excited about even if it means a shorter summer.
"I definitely feel like smaller classroom sizes you just benefit so much from that," said SCUSD parent Vanessa Cupp.
If approved by the California Board of Education by May 15, the district will need to budget for paying staff, facilities operations, food and transportation during the additional 16 school days.
The extra days that would be added to the 2024-2025 school year would be August 19-23 and Aug. 26-28. The extra days that would be added to the 2025-2026 school year would be August 18-22 and Aug. 25-27.
The SCUSD board will vote on March 21 to request a waiver of the penalty from the State Board of Education (SBE). If the district board approves, a waiver application will be submitted to the SBE on Friday for consideration on their May board agenda.
SCUSD said it expects to learn by May 15th if our waiver application is accepted or rejected.
You can find the full details on the SCUSD's learning recovery plan here.