After a nearly three-year fight to get facilities funding, San Diego County’s rural Mountain Empire Unified School District is getting $4.6 million from the state to finally begin rebuilding its crumbling high school.
California’s State Allocation Board, which decides state facilities awards for public schools, voted 9-1 late last month to immediately grant Mountain Empire the money for contractors to draw up designs for a new high school campus. The district will also use the money to get preliminary engineering reports for rebuilding its other campuses.
It’s a key win for a rural, mostly low-income district that has been unable to secure funding to make desperately needed building replacements for its campuses. Mountain Empire is now one of just 13 California districts in nearly three decades to have won financial aid for facilities after an initial state denial of its request for aid through a state program that helps districts that cannot raise their own facilities funding.
“It was a good victory for us,” Superintendent Pat Keeley said. “It was a pretty long process to get there.”
Mountain Empire’s story is emblematic of several challenges that especially impact rural and small school districts in California — not the least of which is getting schools fixed or replaced.
Small districts lack the concentrations of high-value properties that can help raise hundreds of millions in bond money for larger urban and suburban districts.
And small districts often lack the staffing capacity, technical knowledge and resources to navigate the complexities of facilities, said Yuri Calderon, executive director of the Small School Districts’ Association in California.
“The way the system is structured doesn’t small school districts going after these funds,” Calderon said.
Mountain Empire is San Diego County’s largest school district by area, encoming 660 square miles of mountainous terrain that borders Imperial County to the east and Mexico to the south. It’s a high-need district, with most of its 1,800 students coming from low-income families and more than a quarter speaking English as a second language.
Last year The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on the challenges Mountain Empire faces as a rural district, perhaps the biggest of which is its facilities. Its schools are in such disrepair that they pose safety risks to students and and staff and limit the educational opportunities the schools can provide.
Students have lost days of school to chronic infrastructure problems such as water pump failures and pipe bursts. High schoolers shiver in class during the winter because the walls are so thin and drafty. The high school’s outer walls, the school’s protection against fires and earthquakes, have been gradually worn away by high winds.
On top of facilities problems, the district also grapples with student poverty, staffing shortages and turnover, chronic deficit spending and school closures due to extreme climate, including high winds, icy storms and preemptive power shutoffs.
The district is constantly wanting for funding in part because it spends 7% of its budget on busing all of its students to school — a necessity, considering the district’s vast size — and the state doesn’t provide transportation funding for schools.
The district has estimated that it needs at least $187 million to fix or replace all of its compromised facilities. But Mountain Empire has not been able to raise anything close to that.
One year ago, Mountain Empire voters rejected the district’s latest facilities bond measure that would have raised $20 million. It was the district’s fifth attempt, and its third failure, since 1998.
But even if Mountain Empire succeeds in ing a bond, it wouldn’t be enough to address all its facilities needs. That’s because it only has enough assessed property value within its boundaries to raise up to $48 million.
The state offers facilities funding to school districts, but it requires that districts raise their own matching funds via local bond measures first.
For districts like Mountain Empire that are unsuccessful in doing so, the state offers a process called “financial hardship” to cover the matching funds the district couldn’t raise. But the state’s criteria for qualifying for financial hardship are narrow and don’t help Mountain Empire.
Only 18 out of the state’s 1,000 school districts — including Mountain Empire — have ever appealed a financial hardship denial. Only 10 of those districts have succeeded in winning their full funding appeal.
“Even appealing is rare, and further winning the appeal is even more rare,” Keeley said. “Quite frankly, given the desperate need of our facilities, I didn’t ever think of it as an option to not go for it.”
Mountain Empire earned from key education and state officials that helped its appeal — including leaders of the state’s Office of Public School Construction, which makes recommendations to the State Allocation Board.
Keeley invited state and local officials to tour his schools and see the problems firsthand.
The state school construction office’s leaders toured Mountain Empire last fall and agreed “they have a lot of potential there of issues that they can apply to our program for,” Deputy Executive Director Michael Watanabe said at last month’s State Allocation Board meeting.
“This money would help the district move forward a lot of those projects on top of the project that they’re being applied for,” Watanabe said.
It also helped Mountain Empire’s case that it had the of the San Diego County Office of Education. County school officials told the state in a December letter that Mountain Empire should get financial hardship status because its financial condition is “extremely fragile.”
The district is deficit spending by about $4 million this current school year, or about 10% of its operating budget; the district also must make about $1 million in budget cuts to make ends meet for next school year. The county office said that because Mountain Empire may already need to borrow money from the county just to make payroll, it therefore wouldn’t Mountain Empire borrowing to pay for facilities.
The county and deputy county superintendents of education also toured the Mountain Empire schools in the fall.
“I was originally thinking we’d look at a couple dilapidated classrooms, but it was literally the entire campus. Everywhere we walked, we could see areas that needed improvement,” Deputy Superintendent Mike Simonson said of the high school. “The district has been doing the best they can with the little funds they have to keep schools operating.”
Last month’s move by the State Allocation Board gives Mountain Empire design funding, but the district will later need to raise money to actually build the new high school. Keeley has said a complete rebuild of the high school campus could cost $65 million, according to an architect’s estimate.
The board’s approval is contingent on Mountain Empire trying again on a bond measure in November 2026, which the district has agreed to do.
If that bond measure is not successful, Mountain Empire will have to go back to the state and go through a process again to request financial help.
But Keeley is hopeful that voters will have more confidence in the bond measure now that he will be able to present construction plans for the schools and show them in detail just what a bond could accomplish — something he didn’t have the money to do last time.
This story has been updated with more up-to-date building cost estimates.
