Addison Ma

The balance of power at the school sites is heavily outweighed by the district.

On Aug. 20, the board narrowly voted — in a 3-2 decision — to approve a new district-level position: The Director of Fiscal Services. The addition of the position shows how the district office has grown even as key positions at Saratoga and Los Gatos High are underfunded and class sizes are larger than they should be.

The Director of Fiscal Services’ role is to manage the financial systems of the district. According to Public Information Officer (PIO) Tanya De la Cruz, the director will also organize budget reports and deal with the “more complex duties connected with the financial expectations of the district.”

Until now, the duties of the new role were being fulfilled by the person holding the role of Chief Business Officer (CBO) — in this case, Ruben Fernandez since last spring. 

The board’s recommendation of the new district role came after the district missed an opportunity to receive $300,000 in state funding prior to Fernandez’s transition period. While $300,000 is a significant chunk of change to have lost out on, the addition of a new position mostly over one mistake is an overreaction in such a small district.

According to De La Cruz, the addition of the role is also due to increased compliance requirements at the state level. This is a completely valid reason to create the role; however, our tiny two-school district needs to run a tighter ship. 

To put this into perspective, the largest district in California consists of 500,000 students — as opposed to LGSUHSD with less than 4,000 students (most of them at Los Gatos). Superintendent Bill Sanderson’s previous district, San Francisco Unified, was composed of over 50,000 students. These roles are essential in large districts, but not small ones.

Additionally, many teachers in the district, especially young ones, are struggling to earn a living wage and pay large expenses such as rent. The addition of a Director of Financial Services with a base salary of $189,696 is insulting to the rest of our staff. According to De La Cruz, the lowest possible starting salary for a certified employee is $85,896, which can fit almost 2.5 times into the base salary of the Director of Fiscal Services.  The average salary of teachers is higher than that figure, but it shows the big pay difference between teachers and management positions.   

The addition of the role shows a lack of care over the individual school sites and a shift of power toward the district office. As a symbol of this, the district has even moved school board meetings from the library of the two schools to the district office in recent years.

Even as the district office is growing, leaders are making the decision to shrink key staff at both schools — mostly based on the idea of declining enrollment. Over the summer, guidance counselor Toni Jones told the district she could not return to the role because of personal obligations that took her away from the area. Instead of adding another full-time position, however, the district advertised it as a 0.6 FTE position — which equates to less than two thirds of the other counselors workload. The new counselor, Mary Carol Bernal, is currently filling two positions: her 0.4 position at West Valley handling the Middle College program and her new guidance counselor position at SHS.

Due to this, the three other counselors, with no increase in pay, are seeing their already heavy workloads increase. On certain days, Bernal’s absence on campus leads to questions directed to other counselors, who now must fulfill the daily tasks of approximately 1.3 counselors.

“We do admittedly have fewer students than we did in my first years as a counselor here, but even though our caseloads have declined, I’d argue that now they are just more reasonable,” guidance counselor Eileen Allen said. 

Similarly, at Los Gatos High, the problem with counselor-to-student ratio was previously even worse. When the new district office staff came into place, the District Teachers Association (DTA) requested another counselor to make the caseloads at Los Gatos more equivalent to Saratoga.  According to LGHS guidance counselor Kassandra Cochran — the counselors there have an average caseload of 315 students

Now the full time Saratoga High School counselors have a caseload of 300-350 students per counselor according to Allen, making the caseloads similar at both schools. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 250 students for each counselor.

According to DTA President Jen Young, a math teacher at Los Gatos, the DTA “asked the district to increase guidance counselor staffing at LGHS to make caseloads more equitable, not reducing staffing at SHS.” 

Furthermore, overall employment numbers of certified employees — teachers, counselors, school psychologists, program specialists and speech and language pathologists — have decreased in recent years. According to Young, in the 2022-23 school year the district had 188 FTE employees while it now has 176.5.

Due to the district’s spending and staffing priorities, Young said, “The DTA bargaining unit lost 11.5 FTE in the last two years. The district has been saying that this reduction is due to declining enrollment, but 11.5 FTE corresponds to a reduction of about 362 students, which we have not seen. Our enrollment has declined by about 230 students in the last two years.” 

The cutting down of the SHS guidance counselor role was not necessary and has impacted students. It’s important to note that the funding structure of the district has not changed, because it is a basic aid district, meaning most of its money comes from local property taxes. This contrasts with the funding model for most of the state: average daily attendance, which does take away money from schools with lower enrollments. “The reality is that, as a basic aid district, we don’t have any less money for counselors, even though there are fewer students,” Allen said. “From my perspective, there isn’t a necessity to cut counselors due to lower enrollment.”

In a district of under 4,000 students, highly paid workers in the central office need to be able to do multiple roles. The sad reality is the district-site relationship has worsened in recent years because of decisions like this. The role of Director of Fiscal Services is a questionable spending decision; instead, the district’s top priorities should be goals such as reducing class sizes and decreasing the student-to-counselor ratio at both schools.