Santa Rosa school district on brink of collapse mulls raise for finance chief

While dozens of employees from this Santa Rosa school district collect unemployment, their interim fiscal chief could be set for a fat new paycheck.

Weeks after 80 employees received layoff notices from Santa Rosa City Schools, district trustees are voting on Luz Cázares’ substantial pay raise.

If approved, she will receive $76,000 in additional compensation for her duties. Cázares’ new deal comes despite the district’s messy financial mismanagement. The district brought in too many new workers for the revenue it was generating, authorities said.

At the same time, student enrollment dropped from 16,000 in 2016 to under 12,000 in 2025. California districts are typically paid based on the number of students enrolled.

Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, told the district that it has “some serious cash issues.”

“Far more serious than any other district in the state. I don’t understand why you are always out of cash,” he added.

Cázares was brought on in July part-time to help fix the district’s financial situation as the person formerly in her position, Lisa August Hulme, became interim superintendent after the district’s prior superintendent Daisy Morales was ousted. She’s a financial consultant who taught education graduate students as a professor at UC Berkeley and assisted schools in fractured financial situations.

She also worked as the chief financial officer for the Alameda Unified School District for more than four years, according to her LinkedIn.

Cázares has been credited with steering the school out of its tough financial situation and has worked far more hours than anticipated. She cut the district’s budget by $2.8 million in the current fiscal year and more than $30 million in the two upcoming years.

“We knew that this year was going to take a lot of work but I don’t think we knew exactly how much,” district spokesperson Patrick Gannon told The Press Democrat. “The proposed change of the contract is just a way to reflect that.”

The new pay raise will put her total compensation number at nearly $230,000. School officials say they budgeted more for the position than what was used, and vacancies in the budget department also helped save money.

But teachers are still upset that a top administration official is getting a big-money raise. Some are frustrated top officials are getting paid for every hour of their time while they put in the effort off the clock.

“Historically, teachers’ level of work has always exceeded our time and our pay and the anticipated need,” first-grade teacher Kate Gillespie wrote in an email to the board of trustees.

“For decades we have donated our time and energy to ‘make it work.’ And just a heads up… we don’t do it tirelessly, as the cliche goes. It’s exhausting. But we do it and have continued to do it for years and years… (District administrators) have never suggested that we should be paid for our unpaid work,” she added.

Other top officials like Hulme, assistant superintendent Dr. Vicki Zands, and assistant superintendent of teaching and learning Roderick M. Castro all make more than $200,000 a year in benefits and pay.

Gannon says the additional work required of Cázares will be discussed in the meeting.

“This is a difficult time — this is the discussion we’re going to have tonight to talk about the additional work that was required and a potential adjustment to the contract to reflect the work,” Gannon said. “We wanted to do that in a way that was transparent.”

Santa Rosa Teacher Association leaders believe the pay raise was unnecessary.

“Greater than expected workload is not enough to increase the pay for classified employees,” they said.

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