Equalizing the fiscal information level at the bargaining table.

1Why this site exists

California's K–12 system serves roughly six million students across more than 10,000 schools, run by 58 county offices of education, about 1,000 local school districts, and nearly 1,300 charter schools. We believe the California education system is one of the best in the world.

But over the past year, more districts than usual are facing financial crisis. The California Department of Education tracks districts in fiscal trouble through two interim certification statuses — and the numbers are unusually high right now.

2Who this is for

This website is designed to equalize the fiscal information level between union members and union staff and their management counterparts.

Across the bargaining table, district administrators arrive with full visibility into the funding the state sent them — down to the line item. Too often, the union side is working from summaries, secondhand numbers, or whatever the district chooses to share. That asymmetry shapes outcomes.

Union workers and union staff need a basic, working understanding of how the state funds the education budget — so the negotiating field between union representatives and school administrators is genuinely level.

3What we publish

We republish, in clean and readable form, the publicly available actual funding amounts the state sends to each California school district — exactly as posted on the California Department of Education's Principal Apportionment pages. Nothing here is invented or estimated; it is the same data the district's chief business official sees, presented for the people on the other side of the table.

For each district, the site shows the headline state-paid apportionments — Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), Education Protection Account (EPA), Special Education, Home-to-School Transportation, Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELO-P), Prop 28 Arts & Music in Schools, and the other line items from the Principal Apportionment certification. We also publish a year-over-year comparison of the most recent data against the prior year — so you can see, line item by line item, how each district's funding shifted.

Alongside the numbers, we provide short, plain-English explanations of these programs and a brief tutorial on how the LCFF formula and the Principal Apportionment cycle (P-1, P-2, Annual) actually work.

4Our mission

At Len San School Finance Services, our goal is to offer both the training and the information that union bargainers need to hold districts accountable for their budget proposals — armed with the actual state-funded apportionments to their local district.

Our primary service is a school finance portal that lists the funding amount per pupil for every available apportionment, so that local bargaining fights can be grounded in the full available funding as intended by the state legislature — not a partial picture chosen by management.

5Where the data comes from

Every number on this site is sourced from official California state publications. We do not modify the values; we reformat them for readability and add explanatory context.