Last night, the school Board approved the 2009-2010 school year budget. Of course it contained cuts, and it still heralds potential cuts for next year, but compared to many of our neighbors we actually avoided some of the most egregious reductions in programs. This budget still has us deficit spending almost $300,000 next year, but a three year projection shows that by the end of the third year, we’d stay above the state-mandated 3% reserve level (at approximately 4.1%). To put this in perspective, just last year we had reserves of around 14%, which means this year (2008-2009) we had to significantly exhuast those reserves because of the massive State cuts made AFTER the year had already begun.
Here’s a quick summary of changes for the 2009-2010 budget:
- Measure B, a larger enrollment, a larger contribution from SCEF, and one-time federal stimulus money all helped on the revenue side, but we project (based on the latest Governor’s proposed budget) that we will get an additional 3.5% cut in our “Revenue Limit” (amount funded per child) above and beyond the cuts already made this year
- Class sizes for K-3 are increased to 22:1
- All employees will receive a 2-day furlough with a commensurate decrease in salary (approximately 1%) — the CSEA (classified employees union — the non-teaching staff) hasn’t agreed to this yet, but everyone else has
- Reduction in groundskeepers and night custodians
- Reduction in teaching coaches and teacher professional development
- No current year contributions to our “deferred maintenance” fund or to the future retiree health benefit fund
- Reduction of travel and conference expenditures
- Reduction of district technology expenditures
- Reduction in school site budgets (which largely affect both professional development and other site-specific projects)
- Reduction in funding for the Healthy Cities tutoring program
- Reduction in GATE funding
- Increase in fees for athletic groups to use school fields
Also, many of you already know that our Special Education department has done a tremendous job in actually improving our program while actually saving the District a significant amount of money (this was done by “in-sourcing” services). Without this restructuring, we’d likely have faced at least another $500K in cuts.
Programs and people that were not affected include music, P.E., librarians, counselors, the literacy program, hands-on science, assistant principals, etc.
Many projections are that the State financial situation will get worse before it gets better, so we definitely could be facing more severe cuts a year from now, or in a worst-case scenario, see cuts mid-year. So, on the one hand I’m very thankful that we can get to a budget which does preserve almost all of the key district priorities, but at the same time I remain very cautious about the future financial health of our district and all others in the State, and with that financial health comes our ability to continue to provide a great education to all of our students.
Thanks to everyone for all of their hard work this year and all of the shared sacrifices, and unfortunately we may be all asked to do it again over the next twelve months.
