Did California Quietly End “Butts In Seats” School Funding? What Parents Need To Know
The last parent-teacher conference of the night ran 15 minutes over, my coffee had gone cold, and I was picking crumbs of granola bar off my plastic folding table when Lila leaned forward and asked the question I get at least three times every fall: “If attendance was up last year, why’d we cut the librarian back to three days a week? I thought we get more money when more kids show up.”
I told her it’s not her imagination, and the rules changed a couple of years back, almost no one talked about it. When I started teaching 11 years ago at this same K-8 in Sacramento, “butts in seats” wasn’t just a silly saying—it was our entire budget. Every empty desk meant real money out the door for our school. I spent two hours every Friday making attendance calls, not just to check on a kid, but to remind parents that unexcused absences cost us $110 a pop back then. I lost count of how many parents texted me saying their kid had a low-grade fever but they were sending them in anyway, because we couldn’t afford to lose the cash for our 5th grade camping trip.
The shift happened in 2021, tucked into a 1,000-page state budget bill that got next to no local news coverage. California phased out funding based on average daily attendance—the official name for “butts in seats”—and fully switched to funding based on how many students a school enrolls each year, starting this last school year. On paper, that means the state did quietly quit “butts in seats” funding for good. The change was so quiet, most parents I talk to have never even heard of it. Half the teachers in my district still don’t realize the rules changed, because admin never sent out a mass email explaining what it meant for day-to-day work.
For me, the best change is obvious. I don’t pressure parents to send sick kids to school anymore. Last semester, one of my students missed 12 days with asthma flare-ups after the summer wildfires. Ten years ago, I would’ve been stressing about how that absence hit our grade-level supply budget, which gets a small per-student allotment tied to attendance. This year? I just sent homework to his dad’s email, checked in once a week, and never gave the budget a second thought. I changed my auto-reply to parent absence texts this year to just say “Hope they feel better soon! Let me know if you need homework when they’re ready.” No more lines about clearing the absence to protect funding. Parents have told me that small change takes a huge weight off them, especially when they can’t afford to miss a day of work to stay home with a sick kid, but don’t want to send them in to get everyone else sick.
But the change isn’t as simple as it sounds. The state quit funding by attendance, but most districts still allocate money to individual schools based on average daily attendance internally. That’s what happened at our school this year. We have the exact same number of enrolled kids as we did two years ago, but our average daily attendance was 1.8% lower than the district’s projection, thanks to a bad flu season and more kids staying home with COVID. The district cut our site budget by $12,000, so we had to cut the librarian’s hours to pay for paraprofessional raises that the state mandated. That’s why no one’s talking about it much: the shift is partial, messy, and depends entirely on where you live. Schools in districts that aligned their internal rules with the state’s new model get all the benefits, while others are still operating like it’s 2019.
This shift matters for low-income schools most of all. Schools that serve higher numbers of kids experiencing housing instability, or kids with chronic health conditions, have always had higher absentee rates. Under the old system, they got less funding every year just for serving the kids who needed more support, which created a vicious cycle. Now that the state funds based on enrollment, that penalty goes away—if districts pass that change along to individual schools.
If you’re a parent or teacher wondering where your district stands, there are two easy, concrete steps you can take right now. First, ask your PTA rep or school principal two straight questions: does our district fund our school based on total enrollment, or daily attendance? That’s all you need to ask, no jargon required. Second, if you’re a parent, you don’t have to default to sending a sick kid to school to protect the school’s budget anymore. If your district has aligned with the state, one or two absences a year won’t change your school’s funding at all. If they haven’t, you can bring the question up at your next school board meeting—it’s a simple policy change that doesn’t cost the district extra money, it just changes how they allocate what they already have.
I was at a regional principal meeting last month, where a leader from a low-income elementary in Oakland said the new funding model let them keep their free after-school tutoring program open all year, even when chronic absenteeism ran 15% higher than projected. A principal from a wealthy suburban district 20 minutes away said her board still uses daily attendance for site funding, so they’re still cutting programs when kids stay out sick. No one’s marching on Sacramento about this, and there’s no big campaign to tell parents the rules changed. It’s just one of those quiet shifts that happens in education, that only shows up in small ways: less stress for parents of sick kids, a librarian that’s only here three days a week, one less two-hour block of attendance calls for teachers every week. I still get Lila’s question at every conference season. I answer it honestly, tell people what’s changed and what hasn’t, and that’s that. It’s not a fix for all of education’s funding problems, but it’s a small change that makes daily life a little easier for most of us— as long as you know it exists.
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