Ross Valley School District forum focuses on special education

New understanding is needed at Ross Valley School District about the budget situation and special education in particular, its superintendent said this week.

“I will never discuss special education as the cause of our budget problems,” Tyler Graff told about 45 parents, teachers and board members at a forum Wednesday. “The cause of our budget problems is that we have the lowest ADA in Marin County.”

ADA refers to average daily attendance, the marker the state uses to distribute per-student subsidies.

Graff said the forum was his “first step” toward creating a stronger level of parent and student success and satisfaction with special education in the district.

“Our survey last year showed some parents either disagree or strongly disagree that their children are getting enough support,” he said. “This is a concern to me. We should have no parents feeling like their kids are not getting enough support.”

Ross Valley parent and teacher Alison Rowan, whose two children have special needs, said she appreciated the event.

“We haven’t had a meeting like this in the 10 years I’ve been in the district,” Rowan said. “This meeting is a step in the right direction.”

Parent Minna Kim of Fairfax said she felt the problem was that the Ross Valley district needed to hire more aides, teachers and administrators who are specifically trained in special education.

“There’s not enough resource people,” she said.

Kim has two children who started school in the district but were unable to get the help they needed for serious dyslexia and had to transfer. Her son in particular “never learned to read” in the Ross Valley system and had to attend a special school in Belmont, she said.

Kim’s daughter received reading instruction both at home and at a neighboring district and is now able to read, she said.

Graff said the district has 1,683 students, 231 of whom have a plan to address special needs called an individual education plan, or IEP. Another 15 students receive special education at an outside, non-public school or agency, he said.

He said the district is doing its best to hire special education teachers and aides, but those employees are in high demand, he said.

“Math, science and special education are the hardest to staff,” Graff said.

Graff said he hopes to open up more of a dialogue with parents so they can feel more comfortable with existing resources.

At the event, Graff had parents grouped at tables. Participants at each table exchanged names and brief positive anecdotes about their children. Later, they listed their concerns on a series of posters and bombarded Graff with questions when he took the “hot seat.”

Graff said he will read all the posters and compile a list of the top five or six issues to be addressed, then send out messages to the group about what actions the district plans to take.

“I felt like it went well, and that families were excited to be able to build community and share their thoughts about our special education program,” Graff said after the event.

Meanwhile, Graff said, he is explaining the district’s serious budget situation to the community as a whole in hopes that by May, there might be support for a supplemental parcel tax.

The district, which has a parcel tax of about $690 per $100,000 of assessed value, surveyed the community earlier this year about putting an add-on parcel tax on the ballot. The survey results were not encouraging, so the idea was dropped.

Ross Valley has a low tax base because many homes in Fairfax and San Anselmo have been kept in the same families for decades, limiting market appreciation under the state’s Proposition 13, Graff said.

Graff said the district has a $30 million budget and $8 million is set aside for special education. He feels the money is being spent wisely but there is not enough to go around.

“We don’t have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem,” Graff said.

Graff said the district receives $10,985 in state subsidies per student, the state’s minimum amount. That is in contrast to the Bolinas-Stinson Union School District, for example, which receives $48,355 per student through state subsidies combined with property taxes.

The Bolinas-Stinson district is one of many Marin districts that are called “basic aid” because they receive most of their funds through local property taxes. Ross Valley and a couple other districts are called LCFF, for local control financing formula, meaning they just get the state minimum.

However, Ross Valley does not get the extra state subsides for low-income or English language learners that other nearby LCFF districts, such as San Rafael Elementary District and the Novato Unified School District, receive. So the district gets neither the advantages of a high property-tax base nor of a low-income student population.

“We just flip-flop in the middle, every year, going from basic aid to LCFF,” Graff said. “Even when we are basic aid, we just get a dribble of extra money.”