Among the items discussed at Thursday’s Del Norte County Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting: Standing Budget Committee: Trustees approved the creation of a formal budget committee with dedicated meetings that will focus on how to be transparent about the district’s financial situation with all stakeholders, including parents. Coming two months after he and his colleagues approved a 2025-26 budget amid warnings that DNUSD faces a slow decline in revenue and an increase in expenditures, District 5 Trustee Michael Greer said the meetings will be public. “We want participation from teachers, community, parents, staff,” he said. “It’s not necessarily going to be like a school board meeting. We will be able to have a little bit more back and forth because of the type of meeting it is.” Greer and Board President Charlaine Mazzei will sit on the committee. The first meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 18 at the district office. However, Greer said, the plan is to visit other school sites so “we can make the budget stuff down the road site specific.” Just before the Board approved the 2025-26 budget on June 26, trustees learned that DNUSD was expected to have a $4.6 million deficit. For 2026-27 that projected deficit was expected to be $4.12 million and for 2027-28 the deficit was expected to be $5.9 million. The Board’s decision to adopt the budget capped a process that included distributing — and later rescinding — layoff notices to teachers and classified staff as well as outcry from parents at Mountain School in Gasquet over the potential loss of one of their teachers. On Thursday, Mazzei said she had participated in a meeting with staff at Redwood School last week, that also touched on the loss of a teaching position. “We lost teaching positions at almost all of our schools,” she said. DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris, who also attended that meeting, said one question that came up was if teachers and staff know how much money their school receives for parent engagement, instructional materials, supplies and capital purchases. “The answers are very mixed, but overwhelmingly it’s not really,” he said. “One of the things we’re working on this year is putting together, almost a mechanism to be able to see how much money the school gets for each of those funding areas and at different times during the year, where are they with their expenditures.” Toward the end of the year some schools had tens of thousands, in some cases more than $100,000, in unspent money that could have been used for student programs and events, Harris said. Since the budget committee is a standing committee it has to comply with the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s meeting law. Agendas will be posted 72 hours in advance and, at some point, the committee will decide whether or not bylaws are necessary and who else should be encouraged to participate, Harris said. ##### "We Don't Really Know": Though he agreed with most of an updated Board policy concerning science instruction, Greer took issue with a statement concerning the “causes and effects of climate change.” Greer pulled the item from a slew of other Board policy updates he and his colleagues were asked to approve. He said he wanted to vote on the item separately because “I know what my opinion is.” The changes to Board Policy 6142.93 reflect an update to California Education Code. State Education Code requires scientific instruction to include an emphasis on understanding “the place of humans in ecological systems, the causes and effect of climate change and the methods to mitigate and adapt to climate change.” “I don’t agree with it because we don’t really know,” Greer told his colleagues. “It’s just that one statement in there. It goes on to say, ‘key scientific concepts, methods of scientific inquiry and investigation to experiments and other activities’ — I agree with all the other stuff. It’s just the one thing in there. But I also know it’s required by state law.” Greer’s misgivings prompted Board President Charlaine Mazzei to air her own concerns that the school district’s state funding could potentially be at risk if the local Board of Trustees “start making opinions” about state law. However, Harris said that while trustees can vote to eliminate a passage in Board Policy, it doesn’t change state law. Teachers will still be required to teach students about climate change, but if someone asks to see the local policy that requires climate change be taught, there won’t be one, Harris said. However, if the Board prohibits instruction focusing on climate change, it puts teachers in the position of either not following the local policy or breaking state law. “By not voting on it or by pulling the policy or by saying, ‘I don’t agree with what’s in red,’ or whatever it is, it doesn’t change what the reality is for teachers in the classroom,” Harris said. “But it could be at some point, the state or somebody comes back and says you have to have a policy or we’re going to pull your instructional funding.” Greer said he wasn’t asking for the policy to be rewritten or changed. He also agreed with Mazzei who said that she felt there was a political aspect to the inclusion of climate change in the Ed Code provision that touches on scientific instruction. Mazzei said she didn’t want to wordsmith the policy. “Either we vote it up or we vote it down,” she said. “This isn’t something I want to figure out how to make everybody happy [with].”