District closes $800,000 budget gap, adopts spending plan

Posted

Three weeks after the Board of Education and school administrators debated how to close an $800,000 gap in the 2018-19 budget, the district presented a plan Monday that was met with unofficial approval.

The school board then adopted the budget on Tuesday.

The proposed $117 million budget is a nearly 4 percent increase over the current spending plan. The tax levy, or amount that the district will collect from the district’s taxpayers, increased by 2.98 percent.

In front of a few dozen parents and community members, Robert Bartels, assistant superintendent of business and personnel, detailed the administration’s new recommended cuts, including $100,000 in aide hours, $80,000 in funds for permanent substitute teachers and a $50,000 reduction of a proposed transfer toward the district’s lunch program.

The new suggestions came after board members rejected previous recommendations last month, which included cutting the frequency of a Foreign Language in the Elementary School, or FLES, program, and reducing hours for aides in the district’s five elementary schools by 10 percent.

Bartels said Monday that the $100,000 cut in aide hours — a combined loss of 28 aide hours per day in South Side High School and William S. Covert and Francis F. Wilson elementary schools — would affect administrative duties, but would not directly impact classrooms or students.

“Every single piece that we had looked at so far really has little or no impact on the instructional program,” said Schools Superintendent Dr. William Johnson. He had noted previously that a $700,000 increase in health insurance premiums and $600,000 in new staffing had made this year’s budget process one of the most difficult in recent years.

Bartels added that the proposed $80,000 cut in permanent subs would amount to two less at both the high school and middle school, but that those roles had not yet been filled. The lunch program, he said, which has had more expenses than revenue in the past, could survive on an additional $50,000, instead of $100,000, which the budget had originally called for.

Among other items helping to narrow the gap was a $130,000 increase in state aid, $100,000 in “retirement breakage” — the difference between retiree and replacement salaries — and the exclusion of a plan to hire a security coordinator, a cost of $100,000, which the board had no objection to.

After the discussed cuts, the district would use the fund balance to close the remaining $140,000 gap, Bartels proposed. The fund balance — the amount left after expenses are subtracted from revenues — is still expected to be $2.8 million and returned to the taxpayers to support the following year’s budget.

“There are different contingency costs that we hope we don’t spend,” Bartels said, “and for the most part we try to keep a close watch on those throughout the year.”

Liz Dion, vice president of the board, said such a strategy allows the district to make sensible cuts throughout the year, and “keep them away from our classrooms and away from our students.” It is common, she said, and has worked in previous years.

“I think this is a really good solution,” Dion said. “People are always questioning when we use fund balance, but this is exactly what it’s used for.”