Trustee Taylor Kayatta

It was my true honor and privilege to introduce Genevieve Didion 2nd Grader Bailey Quok as our Stellar Student at last night’s board meeting!

At the May 21 meeting of the SCUSD Board of Education, the Board recognized Genevieve Didion 2nd Grader Bailey Quok as our Stellar Student!

At the end of her first grade, Bailey Quok was diagnosed with a brain tumor and immediately underwent surgery to remove it. Bailey attended summer school shortly thereafter, and her strength, perseverance, and positive spirit were immediately evident. She faced significant motor skill and memory challenges but through determination and hard work, her motor skills restored and she continues to make progress with her memory. Bailey began chemotherapy last June, and her final treatment was in September. Despite the physical and emotional challenges of treatment, she remained committed to her education and regularly met with her 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Marang on Zoom and completed her assignments.

Bailey attended school whenever her immune system allowed. From September through October, Bailey underwent radiation treatment in San Diego. The Didon community helped Bailey stay connected while she was away, which lifted her spirits. Bailey was eager to return to school and came back just days after completing radiation treatment.

Bailey loves reading, math is her favorite subject, and proudly declares pink as her favorite color. She has recently returned to all her favorite activities including basketball, softball, gymnastics, and swim team. She also performed in the Young Actors’ Stage production of Little Mermaid, Jr. this past weekend.

Bailey’s courage, determination, and joyful spirit make her a truly deserving recipient of the Stellar Student Award. Her journey has impacted everyone around her. She taught her classmates about compassion and empathy and reminded them why relationships matter. She has shown everyone that perseverance is possible in the face of overwhelming challenges. Congratulations Bailey!

Last night’s Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE) board meeting raised serious questions about the state of educational oversight and accountability in our region. In a pivotal vote, the majority of the county board opted to overrule the Twin Rivers Unified School District’s (TRUSD) deeply considered decision to revoke the charter of Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools.

The reasoned and difficult decision by the locally elected TRUSD board was backed by extensive documentation and months of deliberation, most notably a scathing independent report from the California State Auditor and the investigations that followed which revealed severe and systemic issues at Highlands including receiving more than $180 million in education for which it was not legally eligible, wasteful spending (including top-tier accommodations for staff travel to Europe, Hawaii, and high-rise lodging in San Diego), credentialing failures, and questionable spending on things like a baseball field in Marysville.

Advocating for vulnerable students should never be used as a shield against financial and ethical accountability. Using the needs of marginalized communities to justify this level of institutional malfeasance does a profound disservice to the very students the school aims to protect. Yet that is exactly what I saw on display last night. And a majority of the SCOE Board bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Conversely, the argument presented by the SCOE majority (and championed by defenders like former Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg who spoke passionately in support of reversing TRUSD’s decision) sets a concerning precedent. The core of their argument was that valuable educational programs should not be held back by "past mistakes" of their organization. However, downplaying documented fraud and mismanagement as mere "mistakes" erodes public trust in how education dollars are spent. And it misunderstands the entire purpose of charter school law in California.

I am struck by stark contrast between the institutional support of Highlands and the lack of support from Sacramento’s political leaders for maintaining local control of the Sac City Unified School District. Our political leaders are happy to stand up for schools like Highlands with serious and criminal past practices, yet are nowhere to be found to speak up for our traditional public schools.

The message I heard from Mayor Steinberg last night, which a majority of the SCOE Board supported, is that charter schools should be protected no matter what – even if they steal $180 million. Yet district schools and school boards are presumed to be incompetent. I resent that message.

Tonight’s decision demonstrates that the SCOE board is far from a collection of "sleepy," low-stakes seats. The choices made by this body have massive, long-term impacts on our communities. When the county board actively votes to shield compromised organizations from accountability, it weakens our entire public education ecosystem.

The time is nigh for Sac City leadership, including our top administrators and our site leaders, to recognize their role in our current crisis and to join us in the solution - rather than blaming others for failures for which they have been complicit.

After graduating from law school, I started my career not as a courtroom lawyer but as a financial and performance auditor. I evaluated public agencies, local governments, and school districts for compliance, operational best practices, and fiscal accuracy. Along the way, I earned my CPA license. My primary takeaway from those years was the importance of “tone at the top.” An organization is only as effective, honest, and fiscally disciplined as the culture established by its leadership. I carry that principle with me every day as a school board member.

In Sac City Unified, the Board sets policy and direction, but the day-to-day management of this district is embedded in our administrative structures at the Serna Center and our school site leadership. As a former auditor, I have serious concerns with the operational "tone" being set by the institutional management structures charged with implementing Board policy.

Some may view a critique of our administrative culture as an attack on management or the union that represents many of our administrators. In reality, it is a necessary challenge to an institutional status quo that has tolerated operational dysfunction for far too long. When administrative structures adopt a defensive posture, treat school sites as isolated fiefdoms rather than integrated parts of a public system, and resist the policy direction of an elected board, the system fails our community. That insular culture must change, and we must look honestly at the systemic failures that brought us here.

True accountability requires looking at the math that brought us to our current fiscal crisis. We are facing a $170 million current year budget deficit. While structural labor costs inevitably impact any budget, the data shows our current crisis was in fact caused by a profound, systemic breakdown in accurate fiscal forecasting and internal controls.

For the 2025-26 fiscal year, district leadership brought forth a Special Education budget of $180 million. The Board was presented with this figure as a realistic representation of the costs required to educate our students with disabilities. No one said this wrong wrong; the underlying data gap was never brought to the Board's attention during the budget adoption process.

In reality, our actual, legally mandated Special Education needs were not $180 million, but at least $239 million—a $60 million structural variance. And these figures remain in flux in ways they absolutely should not be at this point in the fiscal year. This $60 million gap is the primary driver pushing our district toward outside financial intervention.

Our budget was balanced and positive at the time we entered into our most recent agreement with SCTA, and the AB 1200 report for that agreement shows that it would cost the District $10.7 million. We had a positive budget certification, we increased costs by $10 million, and now we are $170 million in the red. The Board directed management cuts that we now know amounted to just over $20 million. Yet our deficit continue to grow. Those numbers don’t compute. Something else happened.

This was not a minor oversight; it was a systemic failure of data integrity. Management is responsible for the accuracy of the data the Board relies on to make policy and labor decisions. When management chooses to build a budget on artificially suppressed projections—forcing departments to absorb paper cuts while knowing actual legal obligations will exceed those amounts—the entire governance process is undermined. Compounding this, the decision by our former CBOO Janea Marking to withhold her signature from the public AB 1200 report, without transparently briefing the Board on the underlying data discrepancy, epitomizes the lack of institutional transparency we must root out.

This is why systemic management reform matters. We cannot allow for an operational culture where administrative layers distance themselves from the consequences of budgeting failures, or cast blame outward while avoiding internal accountability. We can't think it's normal that principals at our school sites tell our community that our community-elected Board has failed our district or that our district is failing.

This is why avoiding state receivership is critical. The people who should have caught these discrepancies did not. Our auditors did not flag this. The County Superintendent did not see anything wrong with our budget - other than his presumption that labor contracts were to blame for all of our problems. And when FCMAT came in to evaluate our district, they did not look at our inaccurate budget assumptions. The answer to these problems is local, and requires the locally elected Board to interrupt and disrupt the practices by our top administrators that got us to this point.

Accountability has been sorely lacking in the administrative systems of Sac City Unified. While I am no longer an auditor by trade, I have not forgotten my training. That role required me to interrupt problematic institutional practices to restore an organization's mission. I bring that exact same oversight energy to this board. I will not stop demanding structural transparency and rigorous internal controls just because holding the line makes the bureaucratic layers of our system uncomfortable. It's time that our public school system starts responding to the public behind us, and that administrators recognize their role as stewards of that public trust rather than the masters of their school sites and our children.

Mark your calendar! Please be sure to attend the CAC - Community Advisory Committee for Special Education/SCUSD's end of the year awards celebration - and to have a great evening with other families of students with disabilities. Nominations are open now. The event is on June 5th at 5pm at the Serna Center.

On May 7th, Hiram Johnson High School principal Garrett Kirkland was featured in a Sacramento Bee article where he expressed his opinion that the school's mascot depicting a Native American man wearing a bonnet and regalia is not offensive. His opinion was in direct contradiction to express Board direction at our April 30th meeting stating that the mascot is offensive and should be removed from the school with no delay. The Board's direction followed public comments from students and Native members of our community, speaking on their own behalf and that of others, who explained why the mascot is offensive. Principal Kirkland's opinion was also in direct opposition to Assembly Bill 3074 (2025), which prohibits the use of such mascots effective July 1, 2026.

I did not speak up during the Board's April 30th meeting as my colleagues had sufficiently addressed the issue, but I want to be clear: I agree with Board direction on this issue, and I believe that Hiram Johnson's mascot is derogatory and should be removed from the school as soon as possible.

Principal Kirkland has a right to his opinion on this issue, and I am also cognizant that not everyone in the Sac City community feels that the mascot is offensive. However, the Board has spoken on this topic and direction has been set. Regardless of his personal feelings about the previous mascot, I look forward to working with Principal Kirkland and the Hiram Johnson community to find a way to support a strong, proud school culture moving forward that acknowledges the school's history while no longer using derogatory symbols.

The Sacramento City Unified School District is at a crossroads: Do we retain the local voice that our community elected, or do we surrender our schools to a state-appointed outsider?

My vote is for local control.

I understand that some people may feel that state oversight is better, because this board and the boards before us have been unable to address our challenges. I get the desire try something different since our current system has not worked. However, I truly believe that the people calling for receivership do not understand what it really means. When a system has struggled for years, "something different" sounds appealing. But having worked as an auditor for the State Controller’s Office, I have seen the reality of receivership firsthand – and it is not a reality we want.

A decade ago, I spent months on-site at Inglewood Unified during their receivership. I missed my son’s IEP meetings as I was embedded in that district for three weeks out of the month for an extended period. I pored over the data that showed dramatic declines in enrollment as families realized that a district under receivership could not serve their families. I saw what happens when a community is disconnected from its schools. I saw "experts" prioritize spreadsheets over students, leading to catastrophic cuts that drove families toward predatory charters and left remaining staff feeling like they were just "keeping the lights on." The disengagement was real; the lights in the educators' eyes had gone out. Receivership is not a rescue, but a surrender. It reduces education to a minimum legal requirement and strips away the programs that allow our kids to thrive.

At our last school board meeting, the state Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team told us that we had run out of time to address our fiscal challenges and that state oversight was inevitable. I respectfully disagree. While we have made deep and incredibly painful cuts—cuts that involve the jobs of hardworking people who serve our students—we are doing so to make the very changes that our state advisors have told us we need to make. We are acting to save our district, and state “experts” are planning for our demise.

I am a CPA and an attorney, but I am also an SCUSD parent. I haven't been sleeping much lately because I know the gravity of these layoffs and the challenges that remain to right our budget. But I remain steadfast: I will do the hard work of fixing our budget challenges now so that we don’t lose the right to govern ourselves later. I am fighting to protect everything that is great about our district and everything that our families tell us, as their elected representatives, that we need.

State advisors seem ready to throw in the towel on our local autonomy. I am not. I believe that the assumptions that the state relied on in identifying our cash crisis were incomplete. I believe that we have more borrowing authority than the state identified which will allow us to continue operating while we continue to make difficult changes to our spending. I believe that our revenues will sustain us as we make the changes that will stabilize our budget. I am not ignoring fiscal realities; I am poring into the data to see what is truly possible to help us stay solvent.

We have the right people in place. We have a community that cares. I will take the vote for a state loan if it is the absolute last resort to keep the lights on and employees paid, but I do not believe we are there yet. I am fighting for every inch of runway to ensure Sacramento’s schools stay in Sacramento’s hands. My vote is for local control, and I take it with the personal understanding that these decisions directly affect our students and families – including my own kids.

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Over the past several weeks, there has been a lot of activity and a lot of news about Sac City. Our families and school sites have struggled to understand the impacts of our district restructuring which is having reverberating impacts in our classrooms even as we have attempted to mitigate that. We learned about a plan to install artificial turf at an elementary school that the Board interrupted once it became clear to us what was happening. An email that one of our former cabinet members never should have written and which inaccurately described a one-sided version of confidential conversations found its way to the press. A charter high school has been slated for closure despite the Board’s attempts over the past year to keep it solvent. And so much more.

Throughout all of this, the Board has remained focused on the big picture: our budget challenges.

While this activity has been playing out, the Board has been acting. We have demanded that staff answer difficult questions around our budget, cash flow, program administration, and district structure – and for the first time since I’ve joined the Board we have been able to have honest conversations with staff to address our challenges in those areas. We have updated our policies to ensure that problematic district practices will be curtailed moving forward. We have held meeting after meeting with internal and external partners to get to the root of our fiscal challenges and our options for addressing them. We have stayed connected to the community throughout all of this.

On Thursday night, we made the most important decision a school board can make to ensure it is positioned for success: we hired a highly qualified permanent superintendent who has the skills to pull us through our challenges. This was not an easy decision, and it was not one done rashly. In backfilling our former superintendent who left as our challenges started to really come to the fore, we found a long-time employee who truly understands our challenges and has the skills and drive to follow through on the structural changes we need to make to address them. This was not a matter of the Board picking someone willing to listen to us, it was the Board realizing we had already identified the best person to meet this moment – and lead us into the future where we will rise and finally be the school district that Sacramento has long deserved. While public input on a superintendent search is important, when hiring an internal candidate the Board has the benefit of seeing how that candidate has actually interacted with our community and met the needs that we hear about as elected representatives of our communities. Dr. McArn has met those standards and then some. And she has shown a passion (not just a willingness) to be in community to understand our values as she continues her work.

On Thursday, we also heard a critical presentation on the state of our budget and our plans to address it. We discussed and agreed on a few critical points:
1. Our fiscal recovery will not occur overnight. Our budget challenges have been building for decades, and it will take time to turn that around without disrupting our kids’ education. Our recovery timeline is 2031-2033.
2. We need to address our spending in special education. Our students deserve federally guaranteed services, but we cannot continue to spend the way we have been – while continuing to leave so many students behind. The entire system needs to change, and that change is in motion.
3. We cannot spend more on labor agreements than our budget allows. Our future investments in our staff must be sustainable and tied to revenue projections.
4. We need to align our facilities spending with our current student population. We do not have the luxury of supporting expensive and underenrolled school sites as our student population falls. We need to take proactive steps, with true community feedback and input, to decide what our facilities look like in the future.
5. We need a solid, committed, and permanent district leadership team to bring us from where we are now to being the district our kids deserve.

More importantly, we finally turned the corner from a place where staff did not understand or would not implement Board direction to a place where real decisions to address our structural challenges are being made – with the staff who best understand our system bringing forth the suggestions. This starts with the restructuring of our district office, which the Board called for over a year ago and is now finally here in a surgical manner that follows Board direction to right size our administration while supporting the programs we need in 2026. These are the cuts (to the tune of more than $20 million in savings per year) that the Board called for at the time we approved our last round of negotiations and which would have funded those investments in our student-facing staff. We did not know that we were also facing a fiscal cliff for other reasons that hadn’t been disclosed to the Board, but we are not shying away from our responsibility to address that as well now that it is before us.

I understand that it may not feel like the Board has done all of this in “the right way” or that we are engaging enough with community as we do so. As someone whose first experiences with this district were one of a frustrated parent who saw the challenges and didn’t know why no one was listening or doing what needed to be done, I get it. We are in a unique situation, and that calls for decisive (not impulsive, yet intentional) action. And the Board is truly listening to community as we engage in each of these decisions. We are ready, prepared, and equipped to restore our district to the point where we can return to community engagement best practices.

In February, the SCUSD Board of Education approved the sale of the former Maple Elementary School site to La Familia Counseling Center, enabling the organization to continue and expand its services at the Maple Neighborhood Center where its operated since 2015. With escrow closing on Friday, the agreement is now official and was celebrated with an event highlighting the improvements ahead.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to be a panel member for the School of Engineering and Sciences’ Senior Defense of Learning Presentations. During these presentations, Graduation Candidates presented artifacts consisting of their original work, reflected on how that work demonstrates their growth, and finally, how that growth can benefit them as they pursue their college and career goals. I was impressed by each of the students and I’m confident that they are leaving SCUSD with the tools necessary to succeed in the next phase of their lives.

While at SES, I had the opportunity to check out work on the new murals by 1810 Gallery. These murals have been in development for several months following a community meeting to brainstorm what the murals would look like and how they would uplift the values of the school community. These beautiful murals, which will brighten up the school and the neighborhood, are not off the shelf artwork - they are larger than life representations of our school, showing our passion for education in the same way that the DOL exercises prove what our students learned.