Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Creative financing

California style!
Perhaps the best example of the CAB issue is suburban San Diego's Poway Unified School District, which borrowed a little more than $100 million. But "debt service will be almost $1 billion," Lockyer says. "So, over nine times amount of the borrowing. There are worse ones, but that's pretty bad."
(H/T: Small Dead Animals)

6 comments:

SwampWoman said...

Somebody badly needed to invest in a HP12C calculator and a finance class. Unfortunately, financial literacy is too much to ask of school board members.

Oh, wait, I forgot. The actual cost of the loans does not matter because it's not like it's their money.

mojo said...

SD is also a hotbed of Mecha and their racist "Aztlan" horseshit.

Probably just a coincidence.

JorgXMcKie said...

I teach public budgeting, and if there are any worse, on average, public budgets than the average school district I sure as hell don't want to see it.

In general, the budget is set by a superintendent who has pretty much zero training in anything budget related except how to ask for and spend money. Seriously. Check out the course offerings for the average EdD [should be DEd so it could be properly pronounced] at the average degree granting institution [not counting the even worse online bullshit degrees.\].

They are taught nothing at all about such basics as cash management, liability accounting, inventory management [remember when Paul Vallas found over 80M of totally unused Chicago School District inventory, including about 70 grand pianos?], revenue and/or expense forecasting, or any of the other pretty necessary budgeting functions.

If they have a finance or budget office they usually have little to no formal training and are quite commonly political appointees.

The school boards are worse, if you can believe that. Here in Michigan we overlook all the financially failing schools because Detroit's problems are so much bigger. Wait until the school district SHTF and see what happens.

Some of my budget students have chosen to look into to the extent they can -- oddly enough many school districts are incredibly defensive about releasing even public records, and all too often what they do release is impossible to understand] and they uniformly are just appalled.

Ah, well. "It's for the kids."

JorgXMcKie said...

And don't even get me started on the percentage of incompetent, crooked, addicted, crazy, or stupid [and these are not necessarily mutually exclusive] superintendents there are out there.

Spiny Norman said...

mojo,

Since Poway is a very white (77% White, 16% Hispanic) northern SD suburb, yeah... it IS a coincidence. San Diego's southern and eastern suburbs are predominately Hispanic.

JeffS said...

Jorg, you describe a great many Federal employees as well.

Unfortunately.