The Dublin Unified School District’s Board of Trustees recently adopted its annual budget for the 2024-2025 school year. To the dismay of students and teachers alike, the budget features significant budget cuts on account of an “enrollment growth [that] has flattened,” an “exhaustion” of state and federal COVID-19 relief funds, and a “significant slowdown in state tax revenues.” Chief among affected areas are “books and supplies,” “services and other operating expenditures,” and, most fraught of all, “cost of living adjustment (COLA)” for teachers. 

The board’s new budget comes on the heels of a protracted and contentious dispute between DUSD and its teachers over COLA for the 2023-2024 year. While both parties ended amicably with a 6% salary increase compromise, the new budget is liable to revive previous conflict as it only funds “a modest 1.07% increase [for 2024-2025] . . . much lower than the preceding years.” This salary increase, in fact, is exceptionally low: the projected increases in COLA over the following three school years are 2.93%, 3.08%, and 3.30%, leaving the current year’s COLA comparatively depressed. Actually, the language of the budget attributes this remarkably low COLA increase to its 2023-2024 concessions, which “impact[ed] our long-term expenses” on teacher COLA. 

“That sounds awful,” Alivia Hanaway (11), a new student from Oregon, says. “I feel like it’s already really well-known that teachers don’t get paid enough as it is.”

She later goes on to compare this situation with her experience in her former district. 

“My old school was always low on teachers and struggled to find people to hire and, according to the teachers I had talked to about it, it was because teachers just don’t make enough for a living so people would much rather find a better-paying job.”

“We actually ended up having most of our teachers quit to find something better over there,” she concludes.  

Moreover, critics of the new budget have identified the district’s traditional source of revenue as problematic: expansion of Dublin. Indeed, the 2024-25 budget analysis attributed previously rising revenue to DUSD’s enrollment growth, which was a product of “significant home construction within our boundaries.” The development of the district, thus, largely depended on population growth to maintain its expanding budget—a dependence some have argued is unsustainable. 

“I think it’s problematic,” Austin Meng (12) says, a student who transferred into DUSD in grade school. “There’s no guarantee that this growth will continue. Housing and population growth are things far beyond the scope of the district’s ability to manage and predict. It’s unstable.”

In this way, the new budget is regarded by many as merely a product of a miscalculated approach the district has taken to its budgetary concerns in the past. Now that natural population increase is starting to slacken, the district is left scrambling for new sources of income and navigating a declining budget. Additionally, because of inadequate COLA increases in the past, the district was obliged to provide a steep 6% COLA increase that has now left it financially insecure in the present. Many argue, then, that the new budget is not merely a product of unfavorable chance in the present; it’s a result of the error of the board in the past. 

Regardless of the causes of the new budget deficit, both students and staff are harmed by the cuts it entails for DUSD education. Even if financial concerns have been divisive and contentious in the past, the publication of the new budget must become a sobering moment for students, staff, and DUSD alike that unites all parties around a resolution to ameliorate the now-declining situation of DUSD.