Hanna Schmidt

In California, public school funding has decreased since the tax rate that was funding public schools has been reduced; moreover, the factor of how many students are attending public schools has affected public schools’ funding. As you go through the list of classes available at our school as you send in your applications for next year’s schedule, you may ask yourself, are we an underfunded school? This question might arise in many different situations as you walk across the campus at Oceana High School. Analyzing the data from the anonymous survey, we asked students to fill it out; students answered the question, “Do you think our school gets enough funding? If not, what are some ways we are underfunded?” In their responses, students seem to have a lot of concerns about our school’s founding. Students are worried about not having diversity in electives, AP classes, and sports. There have been concerns that there are not enough AP classes offered. Currently, AP classes are offered for 11th and 12th-grade humanities, chemistry, psychology, calculus, and more. More in-depth about electives, students have shared their opinion that they would like to see more diversity in the languages offered at Oceana. For example, a student who speaks Spanish fluently would have no interest in taking any Spanish classes, with the exception of AP Spanish. Others voice their concern by saying that we don’t have enough diversity in sports teams. One common concern was that our school doesn’t have a football team, one of the most popular sports in America.


There is a line indicating which problems are a question of funding and which are a question of the number of students who would sign up for the class in question. Money is a sensitive issue in life, and everyone has different difficulties surrounding it. Our state has a tax policy collecting money for public schools, but unfortunately, the amount of funding that public schools get from these taxes is not enough. There is no question that public schools in California are more underfunded than in other states because the tax rate that goes into school funding has been lowered. Besides the overall funding of public schools in California, the school’s budget also depends on the number of students that attend that specific public school. The more students attend a high school, the more funding it receives; the fewer students attend, the less funding goes to that public high school. The problem is that every school needs to have good staff and resources besides the teachers; here, I’m talking about counselors, librarians, workers in the cafeteria, and so on. The need to fulfill these jobs in a school will always be there, and it does not depend on the number of students that go to the public school. Where it gets tricky is that if a public high school starts to have a decrease in the number of students attending a high school, the amount of money the school receives begins to decrease slowly, as the amount of money a school receives depends on the number of students attending the school. As this happens, the school starts to have less money on the side to put into the school’s upkeep next to paying the staff and the teachers. This is something that impacts public schools in general, and this is what’s partially happening to our school. Understanding and managing school budgets are complicated. This explanation given in this article is only a simplified explanation of what’s going on behind the scenes but detailed enough to have a better understanding of how things work.


In closing, the diversity within the classes (AP classes included) and electives depend on the number of students signing up for those classes. Some courses might not be sustainable to teach for long periods of time because there aren’t enough sign-ups, as well as there aren’t enough students to fulfill the classes that students might want to take. This is why we must understand how being a small school plays into limited opportunities in terms of classes offered at Oceana. Moreover, this is where the problem of being a small school ties together with the number of classes and the diversity in classes offered at Oceana High School. Some people would argue that learning more languages would be in everyone’s interest. In this case, the explanation of being a small school doesn’t stand its ground anymore. To this possible argument, we don’t have a solid answer; however, this is where our voices come into play. This is when we students will have to speak up, stand up to communicate, and let our voices be heard. We are one community; after all, if we all work together, we can make a difference and make anything happen.