Draft School Budget Would Cut 23 Full-Time Employees
The South Orange Maplewood superintendent of schools identified $1.5 million in non-personnel cuts, but positions will be lost to close a budget gap.
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Superintendent Brian Osborne presented a draft budget of $112 million for the 2010-2011 school year at Monday night's South Orange Maplewood Board of Education Budget Workshop meeting. In order to deal with health care and other increased costs as well as reductions in State aid, the budget would cut 29 positions in the district, while adding 6 elementary school teachers, for a total loss of 23 positions.
The six elementary school teachers are being added to handle increased enrollment at the elementary school level.
Osborne stressed that this is a draft budget and could change as numbers related to State aid become more specific.
Before looking to eliminate jobs, Osborne and district staff looked closely at reducing literally hundreds of budget items—from materials and supplies ($280,717 in savings) and out-of-district travel expenses ($30,951) to renegotiating property and workmen's comp insurance ($250,000 in savings)—ultimately reducing the budget for non-personnel-related expenses by almost $1.5 million.
A cut that irked a number of parents in the audience but elicited no comments from the Board members was the proposed elimination of eight positions from the special education inclusion program model. Although the inclusion classroom model would not be abandoned, the number of inclusion classrooms—co-instructed by two full-time teachers—would be reduced.
Other staff reductions would come from preschool being reduced to half-day (3 teachers, 6 aides), scheduling efficiencies at the high school and middle schools (6 positions at Columbia, 1 middle school library position), instructional aides (2), house supervisor (1), AV technician (1) and maintenance (1).
Osborne said he hoped that the staff reductions could be handled mostly through attritition but noted that, in cases were no one in a teaching specialization was retiring or leaving, the district would have to look at moving employees or RIF—reduction in force—in which the layoff process would begin, eliminating staff based on lack of tenure, seniority, etc.
As stark as a net reduction of 23 staffers sounded, Osborne did not have to resort to projecting further reductions because the scenario at the State level has shifted this week, he said.
Although Executive Order 14 signed by Governor Christie on February 11 would have forced the district to use surplus in lieu of State aid, legal challenges have forced the State administration to change its stance. Districts such as South Orange-Maplewood are not being compelled to use their surplus but are first being made to exhaust all current budget lines and, said Osborne, "spend down everything." After that, districts are directed to look at their maintenance and emergency reserves and then their 2% contingency fund balance before dipping into surplus, explained district business administrator Karla Milanette.
Still, district staff configured the draft budget based on an assumption of a 15% cut in State aid for the 2010-2011 school year.
The members of the Board of Education were largely appreciative and approving of the proposed budget. Board President Mark Gleason's one major sticking point was the delay of completion of the computer lab at South Orange Middle School which would save $100,000 in the general budget. Gleason said that he had "strong reservations" about delaying the lab. "It's convenient to come up with reasons to delay." But, Gleason noted, the district is now 10 years into the 21st century without a modern computer lab for the South Orange Middle School.
However, Board member Beth Daugherty pointed out that she thought substantially more money was involved in the creation of the lab, coming from the capital fund. Board members agreed that they needed more information on this topic before recommending a change to the draft budget.
The next steps in the budget process:
- March 16, Governor Christie's budget address
- March 18, State aid notices
- March 22, Board of Education (BOE) adopts proposed budget and sends it to the County supervior for approval
- March 24, BOE/Board of School Estimate (BSE) Workshop
- March 25, Advertise budget and public hearing
- March 31, BSE public hearing and action to levy 2010/2011 school tax
- April 19, BOE adopts budget and action by BSE
Gleason noted that Superintendent Osborne's presentation and the draft budget would be available on the district website under the tab "Business Office."
tm
10:19 am on Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Mary: 23 on a base of how many employees? That would help give perspective. Also, how old is the full-day preschool program? I'm not even familiar with that -- what does it do? Do you mean full-day kindergarten?
The inclusion thing is a big deal. My own son was in a class with about six inclusion students in first grade, and without an aide it would have been a very difficult thing to make work well. With the aide, it seemed to my limited expertise that they had the best of both worlds: The special needs kids were not excluded or segregated, and neither were the other kids deprived of the attention that might have been drained by the primary teacher devoting a disproportionate amount of time to a little more than one-fourth of the children in the room. Hanging on to that balance seems very important.
It would also be interesting to know the total cost of the computer lab and whether there is a place for private fund raising to get that done. If there were a 501-c-3 way to do it, I could find money for a desktop for such a lab, which we all know is overdue, though as a Maplewood resident I'd be likelier to pony up for a school in Maplewood than for South Orange Middle.
Steve Latz
3:22 pm on Tuesday, March 2, 2010
As part of the budget process, the district produces a staffing chart that shows total headcount in the district. The staffing chart with proposed changes for the ensuing budget year shows changes (up or down) from the current year. It does not include those personnel who work for vendors contracting to the district (such as lunch aides, custodians, security guards, etc.). The cost of vendor contracts is contained in other sections of the budget.
The current year headcount is 846.89. The latest version of the 2010-11 budget proposal has a headcount of 823.89. Remember that this doesn't include contracted custodians, lunch aides, security guards, some technology aides, etc.
The two documents that one wants to look at to understand the district headcount over time (and the pattern of other expenditures) are:
(1) Current Certificated and Non-Certificated Staff
(2) The Cost Center Analysis View of the budget
The headcounts in these two documents must of course tie to one another, as well as to the headcount contained in the "annotated line-item budget" (another available view).
Steve Latz
3:23 pm on Tuesday, March 2, 2010
(continued from prior comment) There is also a "comparative line-item view" of the budget that shows changes in spending by line from prior years through the proposed budget year. The "legal" version of the budget that is adopted by the Board and submitted to the County and State for approval, is also a line-item budget (actually identical to the other two line-item views, but with the annotations and prior-year comparisons stripped out). It is very difficult to tell where the money goes by reading any of these views of the line-item budget, even with the annotations (such budgets are sometimes referred to as the "educational blob").
The best view of the budget for actually understanding where the money goes is the Cost Center Analysis view of the budget. Looking at multiple years' worth of these really tells you what spending trends are and what portion of expenditure in each service category goes to salaries for how many employees.
In fact, once one learns how to read all of these documents together, they provide an unparalleled degree of budget transparency. There is no other school district in the entire country to my knowledge that produces any sort of cost center view of the budget as a public document. Kudos to the Board and the Superintendent for doing so, and thanks to the Business Office for all the extra work it requires.
Steve Latz
3:23 pm on Tuesday, March 2, 2010
(continued from prior comment)
As part of its annual analysis of the school budget, the Schools Subcommittee of the Maplewood Citizens Budget Advisory Committee reviews all these documents. In addition to our recommendations on additional budget economies to explore (and areas of spending that may be underfunded), we determine whether the public documents provide a full and accurate accounting of where the money is actually spent in the current budget year.
Unfortunately, not all of the publically-distributed documents are posted on the district website yet. I will post back here as soon as they are.
Mary Mann
11:39 am on Wednesday, March 3, 2010
tm,
I think Steve answered your head count question! (Thanks, Steve!)
As per the full-day pre-school. Yes, I meant pre-school. The State and Fed gov. mandate half-day preschool for special needs kids. The district grew the program to full-day and included "regular kids" through a private payment option and low-income kids through a grant. Now, the district is scaling back to just what is mandated for special ed preschoolers.
There are no plans to reduce full-day kindergarten at this time. Super. Osborne has previously expressed his opinion that full-day K is a standard that any decent school district should have.