Measure L vs. Measure W

Before Measure W reached the ballot, voters in these two districts had already turned down two separate funding measures within about 13 months of each other:

• AUHSD's Measure T (May 6, 2025) — a parcel tax for the high school district — fell short of the required two-thirds vote.
• WCSD's Measure L (June 2, 2026) — the elementary/middle-school parcel tax detailed above — also fell short, despite getting roughly 65% yes.

Both included senior and SSI/SSDI disability exemptions; because both failed, neither exemption ever took effect.

AUHSD is now going back to voters with Measure W — a flat $168/parcel tax for 8 years (through roughly 2034), with no inflation adjustment, replacing the failed Measure T ask. Here's the part that's easy to miss if your kids are still in elementary school: Measure W's 8-year life means it would still be in effect when today's WCSD students reach Las Lomas. A current 3rd-grader crosses into AUHSD in about five years — while Measure W, if passed this November, would still have roughly three years left to run.

Walnut Creek isn't unusual in going to voters for supplemental school funding — hundreds of California districts have done the same thing, and for a structural reason, not a local failure.

Proposition 13 (1978) capped how fast local property taxes could grow and shifted most school funding responsibility to the state. The state's funding formula — the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) — sets a base per-student grant plus extra money for districts with large shares of low-income, English-learner, homeless, or foster students. That formula covers a basic education, but it was never designed to fund the things many California families expect: art and music specialists, librarians, wellness centers, smaller class sizes, or robust STEM electives. Districts that don't have a large concentration of high-need students — WCSD among them — get comparatively little of the LCFF's supplemental funding, even in a high-cost area like Walnut Creek. (Proponents of Measure L pointed to WCSD receiving roughly $14,902 per student, versus an $18,705 Contra Costa County average — a gap this formula structure helps explain.)

Statewide, California's overall per-pupil funding rank has genuinely improved — from 50th nationally in 2010-11 to 13th in 2022-23 (about $19,894/student) — but that jump leaned heavily on temporary, one-time pandemic-era funding and a strong stock-market-driven state budget, not a permanent fix to the base formula. And the state average masks wide swings underneath it: because of how property taxes and LCFF interact, California districts today range from about $15,100 to $46,000 per student — a gap driven far more by local property wealth than by student need.

That gap is what a growing coalition of districts — organized as Raise the Base — is trying to fix. They point to a jump in the number of "statistically underfunded" California districts, from about 5 in 2012 to 219 in 2024 (an estimated 1.2 million students), and are pushing state lawmakers to adopt the Legislative Analyst's Office's recommended 7.24% increase to the LCFF base grant. It's a state-level policy fight, separate from local parcel-tax measures like L and W — but it's the same underlying gap that pushes districts like WCSD and AUHSD to ask local voters directly.

Raise the Base started with Buckeye Union School District's Dr. David Roth and has since been joined by Pleasanton and other Tri-Valley districts, parent groups, and PTAs. It's the second time in a decade California districts have organized around this argument: a similar coalition, Full and Fair Funding, filed a $15 billion statewide ballot measure in 2019, when California ranked 38th nationally, but shelved it before it reached voters. Raise the Base is narrower — aimed at the legislature, and anchored to a specific LAO-sourced number rather than a round dollar figure.