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District 24 proposes staff, program cuts

Budget eliminates teachers and programs

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The District 24 Board of Education presented its proposed budget on March 25, including cuts to teaching staff and three of the district’s co-curricular programs, and a 1.59 percent tax levy increase.

“As an educator, you never want to make any cuts,” said Superintendent Ed Fale. “We always held the programs in very high esteem and were very proud of them, and we still are, but these were financial decisions we had to make.”

The proposed budget would eliminate six teaching positions: a math specialist; a psychologist; a special education teacher; five teacher’s assistants and three full-time classroom aids All told, three programs, the Spanish language, keyboarding and sixth grade outdoor education programs will not be offered next year. The district will also be cutting six classroom teacher positions.

The proposed 2015-2016 budget is $26,932,379, a 5.49 percent increase from the current year’s $25.8-million budget. The proposed 1.59 percent tax levy hike is the maximum allowable increase under the tax cap law, according to Fale.

“We are very proud of these programs, and others in our district, because we understand that education goes past just academics,” he said. “There’s a whole person to be educated. These were decisions we had to make because there is a tax cap. Typically, we would propose a budget that has a larger tax hike in order to preserve the programs, but we cannot do that.”

The cuts are necessary, according to Board President Donna La Rocco, because of the depletion of the district’s financial reserves since 2009, when an audit from the state comptroller said the district’s $12-million surplus was too high. The district responded with a five-year plan to spend the money.

“The comptroller came in and did an audit of the district,” La Rocco said. “That audit revealed we had more than 4 percent of our budget in our surplus, so we had to spend it in a manner that would return the money to taxpayers, so we decided to do that by cutting our taxes and using the surplus to fund some of our programs.”

When the recession hit, unanticipated events “changed the world,” according to Fale, and the district was stuck with a plan that couldn’t adapt to the financial stresses that came to be.

“Post-2009, the state was having trouble with its budget and introduced the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which took money from school districts in order to help solve that problem,” he said. “We also had the recession and the implementation of a tax cap, which severely limited the amount of revenue we have.”

La Rocco described the Gap Elimination Adjustment as a state measure that required school districts to return some of their state education funding in order to fund programs included in the state budget.

The $12 million was spent at the average rate of $2 million per year, with the last of the surplus allocated to the current year’s budget. As a result, programs were left without funding this year. La Rocco said the board was aware the surplus would run out, but did not realize the impact it would have.

“There are some other things we could have done to help soften this blow, but unfortunately we didn’t do them,” she said. “We could have taxed closer to our cap, but we decided not to.”

Fale said the proposed budget is “essentially the district’s best-case scenario,” noting that an increase in state aid could affect one or more of the cuts, but he called that very unlikely.

“We no longer have that savings stored up,” Fale said. “We knew the time would come when we ran out of money in the account and we’d tighten up a little bit, and that time is now.”