Earning your contract

The CDPI Fall Public Policy Forum is next week. It should be fun. They will have two workshops on earning your center-based contract. That's a big topic now. CDE just re-released a 2007 study on underspending. Between 5% and 12% of CDD program funds are unspent and returned at the end of the year, depending on the program. Part of it is that program directors really hate going over contract budget, because they don't get reimbursed for it, so they build in a safety factor, and most years the safety factor goes back at the end of the year. APPs do the same thing.

There have been  a couple of legislative band-aids the last couple of years to address that, but in the last year the report covered, 2005-06, about $80 million ended up unspent. That's $80 million that was allocated for services, so the fact that it was unspent means the services the legislature voted to provide were not provided.