05/16/2026
The time is nigh for Sac City leadership, including our top administrators and our site leaders, to recognize their role in our current crisis and to join us in the solution - rather than blaming others for failures for which they have been complicit.
After graduating from law school, I started my career not as a courtroom lawyer but as a financial and performance auditor. I evaluated public agencies, local governments, and school districts for compliance, operational best practices, and fiscal accuracy. Along the way, I earned my CPA license. My primary takeaway from those years was the importance of “tone at the top.” An organization is only as effective, honest, and fiscally disciplined as the culture established by its leadership. I carry that principle with me every day as a school board member.
In Sac City Unified, the Board sets policy and direction, but the day-to-day management of this district is embedded in our administrative structures at the Serna Center and our school site leadership. As a former auditor, I have serious concerns with the operational "tone" being set by the institutional management structures charged with implementing Board policy.
Some may view a critique of our administrative culture as an attack on management or the union that represents many of our administrators. In reality, it is a necessary challenge to an institutional status quo that has tolerated operational dysfunction for far too long. When administrative structures adopt a defensive posture, treat school sites as isolated fiefdoms rather than integrated parts of a public system, and resist the policy direction of an elected board, the system fails our community. That insular culture must change, and we must look honestly at the systemic failures that brought us here.
True accountability requires looking at the math that brought us to our current fiscal crisis. We are facing a $170 million current year budget deficit. While structural labor costs inevitably impact any budget, the data shows our current crisis was in fact caused by a profound, systemic breakdown in accurate fiscal forecasting and internal controls.
For the 2025-26 fiscal year, district leadership brought forth a Special Education budget of $180 million. The Board was presented with this figure as a realistic representation of the costs required to educate our students with disabilities. No one said this wrong wrong; the underlying data gap was never brought to the Board's attention during the budget adoption process.
In reality, our actual, legally mandated Special Education needs were not $180 million, but at least $239 million—a $60 million structural variance. And these figures remain in flux in ways they absolutely should not be at this point in the fiscal year. This $60 million gap is the primary driver pushing our district toward outside financial intervention.
Our budget was balanced and positive at the time we entered into our most recent agreement with SCTA, and the AB 1200 report for that agreement shows that it would cost the District $10.7 million. We had a positive budget certification, we increased costs by $10 million, and now we are $170 million in the red. The Board directed management cuts that we now know amounted to just over $20 million. Yet our deficit continue to grow. Those numbers don’t compute. Something else happened.
This was not a minor oversight; it was a systemic failure of data integrity. Management is responsible for the accuracy of the data the Board relies on to make policy and labor decisions. When management chooses to build a budget on artificially suppressed projections—forcing departments to absorb paper cuts while knowing actual legal obligations will exceed those amounts—the entire governance process is undermined. Compounding this, the decision by our former CBOO Janea Marking to withhold her signature from the public AB 1200 report, without transparently briefing the Board on the underlying data discrepancy, epitomizes the lack of institutional transparency we must root out.
This is why systemic management reform matters. We cannot allow for an operational culture where administrative layers distance themselves from the consequences of budgeting failures, or cast blame outward while avoiding internal accountability. We can't think it's normal that principals at our school sites tell our community that our community-elected Board has failed our district or that our district is failing.
This is why avoiding state receivership is critical. The people who should have caught these discrepancies did not. Our auditors did not flag this. The County Superintendent did not see anything wrong with our budget - other than his presumption that labor contracts were to blame for all of our problems. And when FCMAT came in to evaluate our district, they did not look at our inaccurate budget assumptions. The answer to these problems is local, and requires the locally elected Board to interrupt and disrupt the practices by our top administrators that got us to this point.
Accountability has been sorely lacking in the administrative systems of Sac City Unified. While I am no longer an auditor by trade, I have not forgotten my training. That role required me to interrupt problematic institutional practices to restore an organization's mission. I bring that exact same oversight energy to this board. I will not stop demanding structural transparency and rigorous internal controls just because holding the line makes the bureaucratic layers of our system uncomfortable. It's time that our public school system starts responding to the public behind us, and that administrators recognize their role as stewards of that public trust rather than the masters of their school sites and our children.
