By admin 
Stripped by the county of its attempt to fatten teacher compensation amid a worsening insolvency crisis, a clueless Sacramento City Unified School District board unanimously voted Tuesday to send a protest letter to the state superintendent of schools.
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While they’re at it, Sac City might as well send a letter to Santa Claus. And be prepared to get placed on the North Pole’s “naughty” list.
The district’s sudden penchant for prose is a poor substitute for action. But when a board beholden to a union can no longer do it any favors, paralysis and denial set in. At the moment, all the leadership inside Sac City’s Serna Center can do is type.
On Friday, Sacramento County Superintendent of Schools David Gordon justifiably threw some cold water on this board more concerned with serving the teachers union than kids. The Sacramento City Teachers Association wanted a two-year extension of its collective bargaining agreement in exchange for allowing the district to tap a retiree health benefits trust fund for $68 million to ease financial pressure.
Extending this labor agreement would guarantee outrageously generous health benefits, making this untouchable even if the county is forced to take over the district if (or more realistically, when) the district runs out of money. Health care premiums have been increasing at twice the rate of inflation. The untold cost of this move would have run into the many millions.
This is no moment to feather the nest of teachers. What the board did was stunning and outrageous. Gordon’s office was forced to do the right thing.
Yet back in Sac City’s boardroom, an echo chamber of self-praise, the board doesn’t seem to understand that the era of giving away the store is over. Rather than face the music, the board wants to write a letter to California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
“We are Team Sac City, and we’re going to move forward with this together,” SCUSD board president Tara Jeane said shortly before calling for a vote. “The resolution we’re about to vote on empowers our superintendent to write a letter that documents exactly where we are in all this…”
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Thurmond’s office is well aware of Sac City’s fiscal problems. It has a special audit team dispatched to help the school district get a grip on its crisis. Based on the state’s analysis of Sac City, the $170.5 million deficit reported for 2025-26, without action, would balloon to $510 million in just three years.
Here’s the delicious part of Gordon’s move. It calls into question whether the teachers can go along with the very same budget moves if there is nothing in it for them.
In all, the board approved nearly $98 million in cuts and borrowing last week, and the teachers’ association is on record supporting the one-time use of this retiree trust fund to help stem the financial bleeding. SCTA President Nikki Davis Milevsky recently said, “If we’re having some challenges with our general fund right now, we believe that we should dip into that account and free up some money to focus on our students.”
But this dip into the fund was contingent on the teachers getting that contract extension. Gordon didn’t veto the whole package of cuts. He just rejected the millions in new spending on the teachers.
When the board’s letter-writing campaign is over, it should ask the teachers whether it is still okay to deplete this trust fund without a contract extension and financial gain in return.
Is the focus strictly inside Sac City truly on the students, or not?
Trimming a budget to avoid insolvency is an exercise in painful subtraction, not addition. A typical Sac City second grader would probably have a better grip on math than this board.
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This story was originally published August 5, 2026 at 11:42 AM.