About the MSEG Staffing Tools

Introduction

Every OUSD district school receives a set of centrally-allocated positions; we call this its “basic staffing”. The Multi-Stakeholder Engagement Group (MSEG) built these tools in collaboration with district financial staff so that families, staff and community members can see what basic staffing translates to at any school, how each position is allocated, roughly what it costs and which funding sources pay for it.

The tools are new and still being refined. They are built from the district’s own spreadsheets and staffing standards, translated into a common list of positions; if something looks off, it is more likely a slip in that translation or a mistake than a change at the school. All dollar figures are estimates that use district-wide averages, not what a school actually pays. They are meant as a starting point for conversation, not an official document.

How to use the tools

• Choose a school. Type any part of a school’s name in the School box and pick it from the list. Schools are grouped by grade span, and each shows its projected enrollment.
• Choose a school year (staffing explorer). The year buttons show the allocation printed on that year’s district sheet, from 2021-22 to 2026-27. The last three years are the most consistent; a position missing in an earlier year may simply not have been listed yet.
• Build an example school. Pick a grade span, drag the enrollment slider and tick High-need school or Title I to see what the 2026-27 staffing formulas would give a school of that shape. Example schools work for 2026-27 only. High-need (90% or more of students low-income, English learners or foster youth) improves the class ratios: grades 4–5 at 1:29 instead of 1:30, secondary teachers and electives at 150 instead of 155 student contacts, and high-school PE at 250 instead of 255.
• Read the three groups. Positions are sorted into At every school, based on grade and number of students; Set by type of programs and associated caseloads (Special Education); and Only if the school qualifies. Each row explains the rule behind the position and names the funding source printed on the district sheet.
• Check a row against the formula (staffing explorer, 2026-27). ✓ matches the formula, ▲ is above it, ▼ below it — click the symbol for the numbers. Special Education rows use a floor instead of a formula: ✓ means the school has at least the base standard, ▼ that it has less; more than the floor is expected wherever programs are placed.
• Click i to see how the district sheet labels a position that year, and ≈ where a figure was corrected by the district after the sheet was read.
• Current FTE / Round Up Partial FTEs (costs and funding). Round Up counts every partly funded position as a whole one (0.2 FTE becomes 1, 2.5 becomes 3) and shows in green how much that would add.
• Show District-Wide (costs and funding) adds up every school and program on the 2026-27 sheet; the funding tool opens in this view by default.
• Read the funding chart. By default the pie splits the estimate between what LCFF Base pays and everything else. Inside everything else expands that other money to the whole circle and breaks it into six groups; the table beneath lists every source under its group, with shares of everything else. Hover or tap a slice for its amount.

About the data

“Basic Staffing” explorer

• Allocations are the district’s own figures for the selected year, read from the public School Site Funding Profile (2021-22 through 2026-27 tabs, read September 2026). Each year’s tab is a snapshot; a position is shown from the year the district first listed it.
• Formula estimates follow the SY 2026-27 Formulas for Centrally-Allocated School Site Positions (January 2026) and use an even spread of students across grades, so they differ slightly from the district’s grade-by-grade projections. Secondary classroom teachers are sized on projected GenEd enrollment (155 student contacts per teacher, or 150 at 90%+ UPP, rounded up to 0.2 FTE, times five periods, plus one PE period), which reproduces the 2026-27 sheet within 0.2 FTE; elementary teachers and electives are sized on total enrollment, which the sheet matches more closely.
• Position names changed across years; they are matched to a common list here, and the sheet’s own label for each year is shown under the position (the i button).
• Site-directed funding is the sum of the school’s discretionary, supplemental, Title I, grant and parcel-tax allocations that the site budgets itself; in 2021-22 and 2022-23 this included the LCFF Supplemental dollars that later years converted into centrally-assigned positions.
• One-time COVID relief. Dollar awards listed among the 2021-22 and 2022-23 one-time investments (contracts, stipends, extended-time pay) are not staff positions and are left out; the staff positions among them are shown as one-time.
• “At every school, based on grade and number of students” holds the positions the district’s staffing formulas give every regular school, sized by grade span and enrollment — principal, office staff, classroom teachers, assistant principals, counselors, attendance staff and so on — plus, for the year shown, any other position the data shows at every regular TK-12 school (elementary, K–8, middle and high; not alternative programs — including the four 9–12 alternative programs — or early-childhood sites), allowing for a single exception; the school nurse joins the group from 2024-25 this way. A school missing one of these positions shows it as “not allocated”.
• Funding sources are the ones printed on that year’s sheet; the 2021-22 and 2022-23 sheets do not list them, so those years show the current (2026-27) source instead, marked as such. Two are relabelled for clarity: the sheet’s “Title I” is shown as Central Title I, the district-held Title I that pays for centrally-allocated positions (site Title I, which schools budget themselves, is a separate resource the tools do not include), and “CSPP” as CSPP (State Preschool), distinct from CCSPP, the Community Schools grant. TK teachers paid from the LCFF TK set-aside (resource 710) are shown under LCFF Base, of which the set-aside is a part.
• Measure G and Measure H amounts here are only the central allocations the sheet prints (prep teachers and library staff from Measure G; the central share of pathway coaches from Measure H). Both measures also send money directly to school sites, which is budgeted by the site and is not part of basic staffing.
• Community Schools (CCSPP) grants are not positions, so they are not listed; as schools finish their five-year grants, those at 65% UPP or above receive a yearly amount by enrollment ($75K for 10–24 students, $115K for 25–150, $190K for 151–400, $230K for 401–1,000, $305K for 1,000–2,000), which most are expected to put toward their community schools manager.
• Students per teacher (GenEd classrooms) divides GenEd enrollment (actual census-day enrollment minus projected enrollment in Special Day Classes (SDC), or projected GenEd enrollment where the census has not yet happened) by centrally-allocated GenEd classroom teachers, so schools housing Special Education programs are not overstated. The 2021-22 sheet has no GenEd / SpEd split, so no ratio is shown for that year.
• Allocated FTE totals every position shown, split into GenEd and SpEd; the SpEd line is Special Education staff (resource specialists, psychologists and program staff) wherever they are listed.
• Special Education positions have no enrollment formula. The rules shown for them — the psychologist and nurse ratios, the caseload and class-size limits from the OUSD–OEA contract — come from the district’s Staff Service Delivery Standards and its Staffing Base Standard (table below). The base standard sets a floor of one resource specialist and 0.8 support staff at every K-12 school and staffs each Special Day Class program by type; the ✓ / ▼ on those rows compares the allocation with that floor at elementary, middle and high schools (K–8 schools and alternative programs are not checked).
• Castlemont, Fremont and McClymonds staff every Special Education teacher on an 11-month schedule, and the district sheet lists their resource specialists inside that single line. The resource specialist figures shown for them (4, 5 and 3 in 2026-27) come from the district’s Special Education office and are marked ≈ on the row; the remainder of the line is shown as Special Day Class (SDC) teachers.

Costs

• Positions are the district’s 2026-27 allocations from the School Site Funding Profile; example schools use the SY 2026-27 Formulas for Centrally-Allocated School Site Positions.
• Each amount is the position’s 2026-27 FTE times the average total compensation of its job class, from the district’s school-based average compensation sheet, a workbook created for MSEG by the district with anonymized personnel data. Where a position spans several job classes (the two elementary principal classes, for example) the average is weighted by FTE.
• Averages, not actual costs. What a school really spends depends on who holds each position, so its actual costs will differ. The figures illustrate overall staffing costs and are not accurate to the dollar.
• SpEd staff are resource specialists, psychologists and Special Education program staff. Example schools include only the Special Education base standard (1.0 resource specialist, 0.8 support staff); real schools include the programs placed there. Castlemont, Fremont and McClymonds’ resource specialists come from the district’s Special Education office rather than the sheet (marked ≈).
• Per GenEd student divides the GenEd staff cost by GenEd enrollment, as on the staffing explorer.
• Bar scale. Each school’s bars run from $0 to its largest position cost, rounded up to the next $500,000, so compare bar lengths within a school rather than between schools.
• Round Up Partial FTEs counts every partly funded position as a whole one (0.2 FTE becomes 1, 2.5 becomes 3) and shows in green how much that would add to each amount.
• Show District-Wide adds up every school and program on the 2026-27 sheet; each school is priced at its own grade-span averages and, when rounding up, rounded at the school before the totals are summed.

Funding

• Sources are the School Site Funding Profile (2026-27 tab: positions and their funding sources) and the same average-compensation sheets as the costs tool.
• Each position’s estimated cost (as on the costs tool) is assigned to the funding source the district’s sheet prints for it. Where a position is paid from more than one source (principals partly funded by the state preschool program, elective teachers, pathway coaches) the cost is split by the FTE the sheet gives each source; example schools use the average split at schools of the same grade span, and include only the Special Education base standard rather than placed programs.
• LCFF Base is the base grant of the Local Control Funding Formula, set by attendance. The default chart splits the whole estimate between LCFF Base and everything else.
• Inside everything else expands the non-Base money to the whole circle and groups it: LCFF Supplemental & Concentration (the LCFF grants for low-income students, English learners and foster youth, including positions approved as one-time on Supplemental funds); Special Education; parcel taxes (Measures G, H and AA); Central Title I; TK funding (the LCFF TK add-on); and other — the Learning Recovery block grant, CSI, CSPP (State Preschool) and the CTE Incentive Grant. Shares in that view are of everything else, not of the school’s total; the line under the table gives the total.
• Special Education is shaded gray because the costs of Special Education basic staffing include different types of dollars. Some types of dollars used to pay for this staffing:
  • AB 602 (OUSD received $26 million from this California Special Education grant in 2026-27.)
  • IDEA Part B, Section 611 (OUSD received $9.4 million from this federal Special Education grant in 2026-27.)
  • LCFF Base (Some dollars other than Special Education grants are used to pay for these basic positions.)
  To learn more, review the presentation from the September 14, 2026 meeting of the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education: tinyurl.com/4krabw7b.
• The whole general fund, for scale is OUSD’s 2026-27 Adopted Budget as presented to the Board on June 24, 2026: General Fund expenditures of $881,966,997. The bar under the pie shows that total in three parts: the district-wide basic-staffing estimate paid by LCFF Base, the part paid by everything else (the pie’s two colours), and, hatched, the rest of the budget — everything else the general fund pays for.
• Positions with no average cost yet (a few site-specific roles) are left out.
• Round Up Partial FTEs and Show District-Wide work as on the costs tool: rounding at each school before summing.

Special Education Staffing Base Standard

What the district assigns to each Special Education program before individual IEPs add more. Special Education staffing is set by the programs the district places at a school and the number of students in them; anything above this is based on students’ individual IEPs. Support staff are para-educators or instructional support specialists.

^* The social worker is not a column on the School Site Funding Profile, so the tools show no per-school figure for it.

Sources

• OUSD School Site Funding Profile — public sheet, 2021-22 through 2026-27 tabs, read September 2026.
• OUSD SY 2026-27 Formulas for Centrally-Allocated School Site Positions — slides and document, January 2026.
• OUSD Special Education Staff Service Delivery Standards — read September 2026.
• OUSD Special Education Staffing Base Standard — Jennifer Blake, Executive Director, Special Education and Health Services, September 2026; resource specialist counts for Castlemont, Fremont and McClymonds from the same office.
• OUSD school-based average compensation by job class — updated sheet received September 2026 (adds psychologists and nurses), backed by the September 30, 2026 workbook for the Special Education and other job classes it does not cover; placeholder figures.
• OUSD 2026-27 Adopted Budget — board presentation, June 24, 2026 (General Fund unrestricted, restricted and total expenditures).
• OUSD LCAP Parent & Student Advisory Committee slides, February 19, 2025.