Submitted by Denair Unified School District:

Employees are the biggest winners in the $15.3 million budget for 2019-20 approved unanimously Thursday night by the Denair Unified School District board.

As expected, the spending plan includes salary restoration for teachers, administrators and other staff, all of whom took substantial pay cuts six years ago when the district faced financial crisis.

“The trustees were thrilled to see this happen,” Superintendent Terry Metzger said Friday. “This has been their priority.”

Restoration was achieved via a number of factors that either reduced expenses or increased revenue.

One of the key moments came this spring when Gov. Gavin Newsom chose to contribute more to the State Teachers Retirement System, or STRS. That decision will save Denair $87,500 in the next budget year, Chief Business Officer Linda Covello told trustees last week. That money will be devoted to salary restoration.

So will an estimated $110,000 saved through a dramatic reduction in out-of-town travel, lodging, meals and other costs associated with teacher and staff training in 2019-20. Instead, Covello explained, the professional development focus next year will be on training done internally or on campus. That decision was reached after positive discussions between staff and administrators.

Finally, the district expects to increase revenue from the state by about $60,000 based on having improved attendance rates at all its campuses this year.

In other action, trustees:

• Approved the Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAP) for Denair Middle School and Denair High School and accepted them for Denair Elementary Charter Academy and Denair Charter Academy. The LCAPs are created in collaboration with staff and community members, and are intended to be a three-year road map for each campus.  “We are in the third year of that cycle,” Metzger explained. “Our philosophy is that we’ve started a lot of great things in Denair and we want to see them through. We wanted to stay the course. We’ve put a long of things in place and we need to let them take root. Next year, we’ll refine this and establish new three-year goals.”

Heard a report from DMS Principal Amanda Silva about plans to roll out a new social science curriculum called Pearson myWorld Interactive. The curriculum aligns with the California History-Social Science Framework and the California content standards for social studies and English language arts. This curriculum also allows students to move easily into the high school curriculum, which is also from the same company.