Los Osos parent Kylee Singh credits Baywood Elementary School’s transitional kindergarten (TK) program for her 6-year-old son’s rapid learning of Spanish.
“The other half of the class that didn’t do TK is still learning the basic principles of reading,” Singh said. “How do you sound out a syllable? How do you make those sounds that are associated with certain letter combinations, right? All of that is the structure they were given in TK.”
But the San Luis Coastal Unified School District’s Jan. 14 meeting left Singh and other parents worried. The district proposed budget cuts to balance ongoing deficit spending created by increasing staff and programs post-pandemic, a continued rise in salaries and benefits, PG&E reducing unitary taxes paid on Diablo Canyon Power Plant assets, and the escalating cost of goods and services.
The TK program—the one-year pathway between preschool and kindergarten—was on the chopping block because of lack of continued state funding.
Singh and her husband are full-time working parents. While she was tense about her second son not being able to enroll in TK, fellow elementary school parent Jessica Boone worried about the alternative solution for her daughter.
“Ideally, we would get into a preschool,” Boone said. “But especially after COVID, it’s been really hard. There are a lot of wait lists … and those lists are really long.”
Preschool, Boone added, is expensive.
“I’m fortunate enough to currently be a stay-at-home mom,” she said. “But that decision was based on my daughter starting school in 2026, and now we may end up having to pay or put off me going back to work for another year, which financially wouldn’t be the best decision.”
At the school district meeting, board members said they felt dejected by the prospect of shuttering the TK program. Board member Brian Clausen said it made his “stomach sick.”
“We’re losing $5 [million] to $10 million a year from the nuclear power plant and a lot of that is through some clever accounting that occurred because the plant was going to close,” he said. “It was devalued; it’s not closing but we’re not getting our funding.”
District Superintendent Eric Prater announced at the meeting that all solutions he devised to save the TK program faced resistance from the state Education Code.
“Gov. Newsom came out in 2021-22 and declared that TK is something we should pursue as a state. With that, we all cheered … but also came the surprise,” Prater said. “And that was a decision by the state Legislature to carve us out of the funding picture.”
Three budgetary issues conflated to compel the school district to suggest closing TK. The first is the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding that was meant to cushion students impacted by learning loss during the pandemic. One-time funds like ESSER helped San Luis Coastal add 173 new staff members since the pandemic. On the other hand, the district has added only 100 students since the 2019-20 school year.
Then, the state Department of Education added new requirements like shrinking class sizes, increasing staffing costs.
Finally, the ending of Senate Bill 1090 funds, which ensured that Diablo operated safely for the rest of its license period, was a blow to San Luis Coastal.
PG&E spokesperson Suzanne Hosn told New Times that when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill in 2018, the utility company had to pay into a community impact mitigation program worth $85 million before 2025 to offset future reduced tax revenues.
“State legislation that directed the closure of Diablo Canyon by 2025 called for the depreciation of the power plant assets to $0 by closure,” she said. “When the Legislature extended the operations of Diablo Canyon in 2022, the Legislature did not change the tax policy.”
PG&E continues to pay unitary taxes to SLO County on local non-Diablo related assets.
According to PG&E data, the amount of Diablo Canyon property tax paid to the county has been declining. In 2018, PG&E paid almost $25 million to the county. In 2023, its property tax was about $5 million.
The community impact mitigation program payments—which supports the region and the San Luis Coastal school district—have been reducing, too. What started as an almost $30 million payment in 2019 fell to almost $10 million in 2023.
While 2024 tax data is currently unavailable, Hosn said that PG&E paid SLO County $9.4 million for the mitigation program. The $85 million funding agreement is scheduled to be fulfilled this July when PG&E makes another $9.4 million payment.
In 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission approved extending power plant operations until 2030.
“PG&E is likely going to not feel like they need to pay us the unitary tax they used to, because they’re still going to shut down in just five years,” San Luis Coastal Assistant Superintendent Lisa Yamashita said. “But we don’t anticipate or believe that to be true, since the federal regulatory agency has granted them 30 years, and we know that the energy expectation in California is growing.”
Yamashita added that the state still hasn’t told the school district why it’s being cut out of the TK funding picture. According to her, the Legislature believed that basic aid school districts like San Luis Coastal—funded directly by the local property and unitary taxes—could absorb the cost.
This belief, Yamashita said, comes from the perception that basic aid districts are more privileged than those funded through the Local Control Funding Formula. In those districts, property taxes go to the state, which defines the per-student spending based on average daily attendance.
“It’s true that we could fund the TK program,” she said. “It will then take away from the other K to 12 programming we offer. The money and revenues that come in, we don’t control. We influence.”
Influence lay in the hands of school district parents after the board meeting. The school board advised them to keep advocating for the TK program in the hopes that the state will grant the district more funding.
Los Osos mother Jamie Lewis coordinated with every interested parent she knew, calling local and state representatives to advocate for the program, and also communicating with private preschools that the end of TK would impact them, too.
“We don’t have the financial means to pay for private preschool, and I want to give her an opportunity to learn,” Lewis said of her daughter. “All of our elementary schools in this area are Title I, so our families in this area are going to be disproportionately affected by this decision to close the free TK program.”
Parents’ advocacy seems to have worked.
In a Jan. 17 newsletter Superintendent Prater wrote that the district’s TK team worked with his office and the teachers association to find solutions to retain the program in the 2025-26 school year.
“Our partners in the early childhood education community have offered resources and support to help us in this effort,” Prater wrote.
Yamashita told New Times she couldn’t share details but she said that she doesn’t anticipate the program being at risk.
“We hear loud and clear from our community. This is a core program moving forward,” she said. “The $8.7 million budget deficit remains, and so we will be making additional reductions to our TK through 12 programming.”
The school board will discuss a formal detailed reduction list on Feb. 4 and vote to address the structural deficit on Feb. 18. Δ
Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 23 – Feb 2, 2025.