Pensions and Teachers

The San Francisco Chronicle had an interesting take on the pension crisis hitting teachers. They compared it to Game of Thrones. I'm assuming this was an opinion piece versus a news article. The article points out that schools are having budget problems even when the state is not having similar issues. This is an issue that isn't just hurting teachers, but also cities such as Santa Cruz. Anyways, here's a perfect quote about pensions (and healthcare) and the impact it is having:

In 2013, California state leaders attempted to address the shortfall by increasing payments from districts into the pension fund to $1,600 per pupil in 2023-24 from $500. This increase will only pay for part of the state pension obligation. Billions of dollars more will come directly from state coffers and never reach education budgets. Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, California has more than $92 billion in unfunded health care liabilities. By 2030, Los Angeles Unified School District, serving more than a half-million students, is projected to spend half its budget on retiree pension and health care costs.

Half, do you see that? Half of the budget by 2030 for LAUSD will go to retiree pensions and health care costs. That's got to be a joke.



East Bay Times has an article about how this is already hurting the city of Alameda, which is across the bay from San Francisco. Here's the quote right up front:

Alameda Unified will cut kindergarten hours from a full day to a half day next year as the district looks at ways to pay for rising health care and pension costs.

This will save the school district $432,256 annually. That is one very specific dollar amount by the newspaper. I don't know if there are over-laps, but here are the cuts that the paper highlights:

Kindergarten: $432K
Middle School cuts: $779K
Classroom sizes: $314K
Teacher assignments: $716K

That's $2.2M in savings. Unfortunately, the article doesn't state how big the budget is so one can't determine the percentage cut.

This Voice of San Diego article dates back to December 2017, but it does discuss how cost cuts are being implemented in San Diego Unified. There are a number of graphs, but the interesting one for this blog post is the pension one.

Between 2008 - 2014, pension costs were relatively stable. In 2008, total pension costs came out to $70M. In 2014, the pensions costs actually dropped to $64M. The estimate for 2018, $157M!

As I've said before, just wait for that bear stock market and let's see how costs rise at that point.