For Napa Valley Unified, the largest school district in Napa County, budget pressures are a constant concern. Over the past few years, the district has made tough choices and shut down four schools to avoid fiscal emergency. It has consistently opposed the Mayacamas charter school over financial concerns, resulting in the school now being under county oversight and at the center of two lawsuits. District leaders also have signaled that hard times aren’t going away, as they project wide deficits over the next few years that will require them to tap into limited reserves. Meanwhile, the county’s smaller unified school districts, namely Calistoga and St. Helena, have not faced such dire straits. In these districts — usually smaller and located in wealthier areas — the local property tax revenue dedicated for schools exceeds the amount calculated by the local control formula. These districts are able to meet their needs from local property tax alone and do not need any state aid. In fact, their local tax windfall often far exceeds the needed amount as calculated by the formula and the surplus stays with those school districts. For those districts, students tend to prosper and campus rankings climb under the arrangement. Given the shortfalls for larger, more urban — and poorer — districts, however, education reformers have long sought ways to rebalance the funding scales. A decade on, gains for struggling districts under the local funding formula are significant, though education observers say they are not enough. To a large extent, school funding has evened out across the state and been funneled toward vulnerable student populations. Still, larger school districts are constantly putting out fiscal fires, especially as a result of declining enrollment. “We have intentionally designed the system to allow wealthy districts to have better resourced schools,” said Carrie Hahnel, a policy expert on school finance. “It means families can essentially buy their way into better resourced school districts because we have attached education governance to city lines and property tax.”