California Lottery distributes $3.3M to Y-S schools

Michaela Harris, Appeal-Democrat, Marysville, Calif.
·2 min read

Jun. 21—The California State Lottery has disbursed over $3 million to schools in the Yuba-Sutter area in the first quarter of the 2021/22 fiscal year. The disbursement is part of a larger initiative to provide supplementary funding to educational institutions across the state.

The California Lottery distributes funds to schools based on the average daily attendance for each institution. Schools in Sutter County have received over $1.7 million in lottery funding for having a cumulative attendance total of over 23,000 students per day.

Yuba City Unified School District received over $880,000 due to its average attendance rate of 12,159 students per day. Live Oak Unified School District received $135,000 with an attendance of 1,884 students per day.

In Yuba County, $1.6 million was distributed to K-12 schools and Yuba College. Over $692,000 was donated to Marysville Joint Unified School District for maintaining an average attendance of 9,554 students per day.

Yuba College also received $560,000 in lottery funding for having an average of 7,751 students in daily attendance.

The California Lottery has funded K-12 institutions in the Yuba-Sutter area since 1985, donating a cumulative total of $172 million.

Supplemental funding for California schools comes from lottery profits along with unclaimed prize money and interest. With these funds, the California Lottery was able to donate $1.8 billion to public schools which amounted to less than 1.5% of the state's overall education budget, Director Alva Johnson said in a statement.

The lottery also stipulated that, according to Proposition 20, half of the donated lottery funds that exceed a benchmark from the 1997/98 fiscal year must be allocated to instructional materials. Yuba-Sutter schools will use a combined $70,000 for new materials.

Since 2017, nearly a quarter of lottery sales have funded public education. Over 80% of the funds have gone toward K-12 education while the remaining 20% have funded community colleges, the California State University system, the University of California and other educational institutions, The Sacramento Bee reported.