Did California Quietly End ‘Butts In Seats’ School Funding? What Parents And Teachers Need To Know
The coffee stain on my 4th grade lesson plan was still wet when Mia’s mom leaned across the classroom table and asked the question I’d been turning over for weeks: “What happened to the after-school reading tutoring that was here last year? Mia still needs it.”
Mia missed 12 days of school last fall with severe asthma, back when our district still counted every empty desk against our budget. I got three reminder emails from the office that semester about her absences; every day she was out cost our school roughly $65, enough to add up to thousands of dollars over a year for kids with chronic health issues. This September, Mia missed 10 days for asthma flare-ups, and no one said a word about funding. But the tutoring was gone. I didn’t have an answer for her mom that day, so I told her I’d look into it – I was curious too.
A week later, I sat in the annual district budget meeting for site teachers, in the basement of the district office where the fluorescent lights buzz and the only snack is a box of stale glazed donuts left over from a school board meeting. When Sarah, our finance director, got to the slide on attendance funding, everything clicked. She said it casual, like most people already knew: “We haven’t done full daily average attendance funding for two years now. The state changed it, no more counting heads every single day to cut checks.”
Turns out, the answer to the question most parents haven’t even thought to ask is yes: California quietly quit the “butts in seats” funding model that shaped school policy for decades. The change was tucked into a pandemic-era budget bill, no press conferences, no big emails sent home to families, so most people outside of district finance offices haven’t heard about it. For 60-plus years, the vast majority of state school funding was tied directly to average daily attendance, or ADA: how many kids showed up to school each day. If your school’s total attendance dropped just 1% for the year, you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. That meant every secretary, teacher, and administrator was pressured to get kids in the building no matter what. I remember 2019 flu season, when a mom told me the office called her twice to ask her to bring her 8-year-old to school with a 101 fever, because his absences were already hurting the budget.
During the pandemic, when thousands of kids learned from home for months on end, the state paused daily ADA to keep schools from collapsing. Then in 2022, they made the change permanent: now funding is based on total enrollment counted just twice a year, at the start of fall and once mid-year. Whether a kid misses 2 days or 20, the school gets the same amount of money for that student. The “butts in seats” requirement is gone, for all practical purposes.
The upside is immediate for anyone who works with kids. I don’t get those nagging emails about high absence rates anymore. When a kid needs a mental health day after a big test or a family loss, or a kid with chronic illness needs an extra week off for treatment, no one pushes back or asks questions. Last semester, I had a student who had repeated panic attacks after his parents split up, and his therapist recommended three days at home to reset. I sent the request to the office, got a one-line reply that said “no problem,” and that was it. Ten years ago, that would have triggered a truancy referral, because the school would have lost enough funding for those three days to flag his file.
For parents, the biggest practical takeaway here is simple: if your kid is sick, or needs a day to reset, you don’t have to feel guilty that you’re hurting the school’s budget by keeping them home. The only catch is you still need to call and report the absence. Schools still have to track attendance for safety, and it still factors into other state grants, so don’t skip that step. If your kid has a chronic condition that causes frequent absences, just ask the front office and your kid’s teacher for extended make-up work deadlines – now that funding isn’t on the line, most are happy to accommodate, you just have to ask.
For teachers, the small shift I’ve made that takes 10 extra minutes a week is to stop checking the absence report for funding issues first, and instead send a quick check-in text or email to parents of kids who are out: “Hope they’re feeling better, don’t worry about catching up until they’re back, I’ll save all their work for them.” It’s a tiny change, but I’ve had so many parents tell me that’s the first time a school hasn’t made them feel like bad parents for their kid’s health issues.
Of course, it’s not all good news, which is why Mia’s tutoring disappeared. The old system gave schools big bonuses for hitting 95% attendance or higher. Our school hit that mark for three years straight, and we used that extra money to fund two part-time attendance coaches, who also ran our after-school reading and math tutoring. Now there’s no bonus for high attendance, so the district reallocated that money to fill other budget gaps, and the tutoring got cut. Smaller rural districts that relied on daily ADA bumps to offset declining enrollment have had to cut whole programs this year, too.
I ran into Mia’s mom at the grocery store a week after the budget meeting, and explained all this to her. She’s a retired 3rd grade teacher, so she nodded and thought for a minute while she grabbed a carton of milk off the shelf. She said she had open afternoons every Wednesday, and would run a small tutoring group out of the public library down the street if I could send her the names of kids who needed it. That’s what we’re doing now: seven kids show up every week, Mia brings homemade chocolate chip cookies most weeks, and it works, for now.
I still don’t know how this new funding model will shake out five or ten years from now. More program cuts could be coming next year as districts adjust to the new rules. But I know this: I haven’t had to ask a parent to drag a feverish kid to school to protect our budget yet this year, and that’s worth more than any funded tutoring program I’ve ever had. We’re still figuring it out, one Wednesday afternoon at a time.
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