Beaumont Unified Puts $86M Bond Measure Before Voters

Beaumont Unified School District is hoping voters will support an $86 million bond initiative, Measure B, this November for maintenance, repairs and upgrades across its facilities.

“We’re eligible for over $184 million dollars of state funding, both for modernization and new construction, but to get to those funds, we have to qualify,” Sergio San Martin, chief business official for the district, said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “We have to have shovel-ready projects…and we also have to certify that we have our share [of the total cost] in the bank to qualify for state money.”

San Martin said Measure B would effectively operate as an extension of Measure T, which voters approved in 1998. That bond, set to expire in the coming years, imposed a levy of $20 for every $100,000 in assessed value for all residential, commercial and industrial properties, which would be carried forward if Measure B is approved.

“It’s not going to increase your taxes,” he said. “We’re just continuing what they’re currently paying now.”

And while the bond is not enough to build a new school to more fully address issues of overcrowding, if passed, it would allow the district to respond to what San Martin called “urgencies,” like repairing leaky roofs across the district’s facilities, replacing and upgrading mechanical systems at existing school sites and managing the wear and tear of aging infrastructure.

That aging infrastructure includes a number of the district’s more than 80 portable classrooms, where more than 2,400 students are taught every day. Eleven of those temporary classrooms were added this past summer, but San Martin said there were some that have been in use for more than 50 years — long past the recommended 15 to 20 year lifespan.

“Even if we stay at this [enrollment] number, and we don’t grow anymore, we still have over 2,000 students in portable buildings that need to be replaced,” he said. “So this bond could help us start replacing those portables that are there with new portables, though our hope would be to replace them with permanent buildings.”

According to San Martin, the district’s two middle schools are currently at capacity, and the district’s sole high school has an enrollment of 3,400 students. He said the district recently closed escrow on a property on the west side of the community and just opened escrow on a property on the east side for potential future new school sites.

“We’re doing everything we can, within our limits, to plan not only for our current needs and conditions, but also for the future,” he said.

If Measure B fails to garner 55% of the vote, the next time the district would be able to go out for bond would be 2028, which San Martin said would leave the district in a really difficult financial position.

“Our deferred maintenance cost, meaning major repairs that we’ve been pushing off because we don’t have the money, is over $42 million, and we’re projecting in the next five to 10 years, it could go over $150 million if we don’t address these things,” he said. “The reality is that we would need to take from here and put to there, and it’s going to be a more reactive system of addressing major emergencies, and we don’t want to do that.”

The juggling act between what the district needs in terms of facilities and what it can afford is a direct result of how the state funds education. 

Public schools are required to provide all students with a free appropriate public education (FAPE), but the state only provides direct funding to districts for the actual teaching of students.

When it comes to facilities, the state requires local districts to have projects and funding already lined up in order to qualify for state matching grants, which are distributed on a first come, first served basis. 

Most districts raise their portion of the money through school bond elections, which are paid through increased property taxes, meaning districts with higher assessed property values are able to bring in more money to participate in the state’s funding program with a lower tax burden.

Sara Hinkley, the California program manager at UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools, said this funding mechanism results in “pretty significant” inequities in facility outcomes.

“There’s a lot of sense that you want local districts to decide when they need to spend money on their facilities and allow taxpayers to decide how much they want to spend on their school facilities,” she said in an interview with The Record. “The problem with that is that if the state plays absolutely no role in trying to equalize funding, then you end up with outcomes that are wildly inequitable, just because the gaps are so significant.”

Hinkley also said it was not fair to interpret a district’s actions as a reflection of what the community wants, but rather as reflection of that community’s capacity.

“I’ve never met parents who care more or less than other parents about school quality,” she said. “If it costs you $2,000 as a taxpayer earning $30,000 a year to upgrade your middle school, that’s a very different calculus than somebody who earns $300,000 a year and their tax bill is only going to go up $400 in order for them to be able to upgrade their school.”

This year’s ballot initiative in Beaumont comes two years after the district failed to garner enough support for Measure E, a $148 million bond package. That measure would have allowed the district to impose a levy of up to $28 for every $100,000 in assessed value. At the time, San Martin said the average property owner would have seen an increase of approximately $140 per year.

San Martin said the district, in preparing to bring Measure B to the voters, was very mindful of the potential burden being placed on taxpayers, especially as the cost of living continues to increase.

“Everything’s so expensive, and so we’re trying to be sensitive to our community,” he said. “We did a temperature read of what the community is willing to support, and we heard them loud and clear.”