The June 18 School Board Meeting: The Budget, the Pride Flag, and What Comes Next
On June 18, the Sonoma Valley Unified School Board adopted next year’s budget and the LCAP, the plan for how the extra money meant for our neediest students gets spent, and held a long discussion about the Pride flag at the high school. Here is what happened, sorted from what matters most to the routine items, so you can read as much or as little as you want.
The Big items
The budget and the LCAP
Going into this meeting, Sonoma Schools Alliance had two questions. Do the numbers really justify the cuts the district keeps making? And did the district finally explain the changes it quietly made to the LCAP?
Start with the budget. The big takeaway is that the district is not broke. It is what the state calls a “basic aid” district, which is just a plain way of saying it is paid for mostly by local property taxes, not by Sacramento. Its savings are growing, they are already well above the minimum the state requires, and it has plenty of cash on hand. So when this district cuts something, that is a choice it is making, not a crisis forced on it from outside.
We will give credit where it is due. A few things that looked alarming earlier in the year turned out to have ordinary explanations. A big drop in the supplies budget, for instance, is mostly leftover money that gets added back in the fall, not a real cut.
But the meeting also turned up real problems. The district came within a few weeks of its budget deadline with no budget actually built, and had to hire a temporary outside consultant to put the entire thing together in about five weeks. A district this size should never be in that position, and that failure belongs to the board and the superintendent, not to one employee who left. The budget they adopted also had plain mistakes that no one could explain in the room: a typo listing the whole district at 147 students when it is closer to 2,900, a written claim that the district is “deficit spending” that its own numbers show is not true, and a charter payment written as 2.2 million dollars on one page and 2.4 million on another. On top of that, a million dollars the district likes to call a “committed” reserve is really just labeled “assigned,” a weaker category that a future board can spend more easily, and the rule that allowed that slipped through on the consent calendar with no discussion at all.
Now the LCAP, and this is the part worth slowing down for, because it ties straight to what we have been telling you since the spring. The LCAP is the district’s plan for a specific pot of money: extra dollars the state sends for the students who need the most help, children from low-income families, English learners, and foster youth. The law is clear that this money has to be spent on those students and used to add or improve services for them, and the plan is supposed to show exactly where every dollar goes.
All spring, SSA documented that the district could not clearly show that. The plan had blank spaces where real dollar amounts belonged, money that may never have reached the students it was meant for, and about 2.3 million dollars routed to the new MacArthur Park charter school, drawn from the same funding that is supposed to serve high-need students.
June 18 was the district’s chance to clear that up. It did the opposite. The plan the board adopted was not the plan the public was shown in the spring. It had been rewritten, and no one on the dais explained what changed or why. One example anyone can check: the version the public reviewed showed nothing spent the prior year on these programs, while the version the board adopted shows almost nine million dollars. A gap that large, left unexplained, is exactly what makes it impossible for a parent to follow the money and confirm it reached their kids. The board adopted the plan anyway, without answering the questions the public raised.
The Pride flag
The board is deciding whether to change how the Pride flag flies at Sonoma Valley High School, where it has flown for about seven years. The conversation ran across two meetings, June 11 and June 18, and the trustees’ positions are now clear.
Trustee Guzman has said the same thing from the start: the flag should fly year-round. He points out that no student has ever asked to take it down or to add another flag, that every objection has come from an adult, and that the flag is a very inexpensive way to tell vulnerable kids that they matter and that they deserve respect.
Trustee Ching added a fact that cuts through a lot of the noise. In all the years the flag has flown, she said, she has never once received a complaint about it. And Superintendent Sutter, Trustee Guzman, and Trustee Ching all pointed out that the flag was put up by students in the first place. It was not handed down by the district.
Superintendent Sutter said the most important thing of the night: the flag violates no district policy. That matters, because it means taking the flag down would be a new choice the board makes, not the fixing of a rule that is being broken.
Trustee Landry’s position has been the hardest to pin down. Across both meetings she has questioned the student survey, raised the cost of wellness spending, floated flying the flag only in June, and said the board has to weigh every view. She has pointed to families she says are offended by the flag, but when asked which groups, she did not name them. She leans toward limiting the flag without quite saying so.
Trustee Bell argues that flying only the Pride flag is favoritism, that the board should fly flags for many groups or none at all, and that the flag went up without enough process. Trustee Lehman favored limiting it and suggested surveying students again.
As for the members of the public who spoke, out of everyone who spoke, only two people, one by phone and one in person, opposed the flag at all. Everyone else who spoke wanted it to stay. One parent told the board the flag is one of the few visible signals telling those students they are safe and that they belong, and several others said the same. The stakes are not abstract: the district’s own survey found that more than one in four LGBTQ+ students seriously considered suicide in the past year, nearly seven times the rate of their classmates.
In the end, the board did not vote. It sent the question back to staff to come back with options and legal opinions. The flag stays up for now, and a final decision is expected in the fall.
Also worth knowing
The Boys & Girls Club partnership
This one is genuinely good news. The district partners with the Boys & Girls Club of Sonoma Valley to run after-school and school-break programs, paid for almost entirely by two state grants, about 1.47 million dollars next year, that pass through the district to the Club. The Club reaches roughly 2,000 children over the year, about 600 on a typical day, and the kids get intramural sports, STEM activities, nutrition, reading tutoring that helps close the literacy gap many students carry from the school day, and even a class on making good decisions, a life skill that pays off long after they leave. The catch is that 115 children are still on a waiting list, and clearing it would cost about 100,000 dollars. One trustee said the district should find that money. It is worth watching whether they do.
The district's self-reflection, and how the Club fits
The board also reviewed its required self-reflection, where the district rates its own progress. The district admitted that literacy and math have not gotten enough attention and that students’ sense of belonging dropped after the school merger. Those are exactly the gaps the Boys & Girls Club helps fill: its reading tutoring goes straight at literacy, and its after-school space gives kids somewhere they feel they belong. That overlap is a strong reason to protect and grow the partnership rather than let the waiting list sit. Separately, Superintendent Sutter said the district itself needs to do a better job getting families to engage and communicate with the schools, a problem the district owns and will have to solve on its own.
School plans for student achievement
The board approved each school’s plan for improving student outcomes for the coming year. These site-level plans are tied to the LCAP and are how individual schools decide where to focus their effort and certain funds. They passed without much discussion.
Briefly, everything else
La Luz facility lease: Trustee Bell raised questions about whether the district followed the proper legal process to lease classroom space, so the board approved it only on the condition that the district’s lawyers sign off.
Charter school agreements: The board renewed its operating agreements with Sonoma Charter and Woodland Star Charter for the coming year.
Food service and the cafeteria fund: The cafeteria fund is running a deficit while the district provides meals to two charter schools, and the board asked staff to look into why.
Solar and HVAC project: The district is paying off a long-term loan for solar and heating upgrades, but it has not yet finished checking whether the energy savings will actually cover the debt.
Other routine items: The board approved the SEAL English-learner instruction contract, a one-time staff bonus, a new weather-safety policy, and a date change for the December meeting.
Before the fall vote
The flag question is not settled. The board sent it back for options and a final vote this fall. If you have thoughts about whether the Pride flag should keep flying at Sonoma Valley High, now is the time to tell the board, before that vote, not after. You can reach the trustees and Superintendent Sutter through the district office, and we are glad to help you find the right contact.
You can also email them directly:
David Bell, Board President: dbell.trustee@sonomaschools.org
Ann Ching: aching.trustee@sonomaschools.org
Gerardo Guzman: gguzman.trustee@sonomaschools.org
Catarina Landry: clandry.trustee@sonomaschools.org
Jason Lehman: jlehman.trustee@sonomaschools.org
Superintendent Jason Sutter: jsutter@sonomaschools.org
Sonoma Schools Alliance will keep watching, and we will keep you posted.
Unidos por Nuestras Escuelas, United for Our Schools.