San Leandro School Facts

Measure J on the March 3, 2024, ballot is another massive school construction bond measure. This is the sixth such measure in recent years. Listed at $174 million, it will end up costing San Leandro taxpayers far more due to the extremely large amount of interest that will be added on to the bond. That’s why parents, teachers and fiscally responsible citizens oppose Measure J.

SLUSD's bond debt already totals $515 million from bond measures passed in 1997, 2006, 2010, 2016 and 2020. Measure J, a $174 million measure, would be the sixth school bond measure on which property owners would be paying taxes. If passed, it brings the total amount of approved bonds to an insane $80,000 per student and the future debt service — principal and interest — to over $1 billion. This is for a district with only 8,600 students (and one that runs ads throughout the Bay Area to try to increase enrollment). What kind of fiscal responsibility does that teach our children?

With Measure J, school bond property taxes are at $180 per $100,000 of assessed valuation to pay for SLUSD's spending. For an average home in the district, with an assessed value of ~$482,000, that works out to $867 annually. And this doesn't include the additional $39 parcel tax for San Leandro schools from measure I that was passed in November 2018.

District officials claim the measure won’t raise taxes. Technically, that's true. The rate in theory won't go up, but taxpayers will now be paying it for decades longer. With the help of paid consultants, SLUSD crafted a way to allow them to pitch hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxes as not increasing taxes. The slight of hand works in part because they plan to postpone a significant portion of the Measure J repayments for more than a decade, until bonds from some of the earlier measures are paid off. Postponing repayment will massively drive up the borrowing cost and the total price for taxpayers.

SLUSD officials plan to spend about a third of the $174 million on designing, acquiring and building rental housing for teachers and staff. How exactly SLUSD will do this and what expertise they have in real estate development is not exacty clear. Tax payers should really have a detailed explanation from the district on how the plan to provide housing more cost-efficiently than private developers. While the bond measure says none of the money will go to teacher salaries, the reality is that subsidized housing is just another form of teacher compensation. No one argues that housing in the Bay Area isn't expensive, but voters already approved an Alameda countywide housing bond measure that adds to our property tax bills. Having every school district and city add their own housing taxes is not the way to go.