By TARA HETTINGER
The recent announcement of cuts coming to Indiana schools has Greater Clark County Schools officials scrambling for ways to cut $3 million out of the current budget.
“The public is being told it’s 3 percent cuts,” said Marty Bell, chief operations officer, adding that it’s more like 4.67 percent of the general fund, which pays mostly for salaries. “It’s not just us either. It’s happening to every school corporation in the state.”
CHECK THE LIST
After the state made the announcement about the reductions, the Indiana Department of Education released a Citizens’ Checklist for people to refer to in case schools talk about cutting teachers.
The list includes a number of ideas to save, such as freezing all salaries, reducing travel expenses, closing underutilized buildings and other options instead of cutting teachers.
Frank Collesano, Greater Clark chief financial officer, said many of the ideas have already been investigated, adding that when he built the budget from scratch last year, he made a lot of cuts at that time.
Bell went through the list, saying what the district has done thus far. He said Greater Clark already has worked to reduce insurance costs, there’s no room to save on school board salaries and the number of administrators has been cut, with himself being paid out of the food service fund rather than the general fund.
As for suspending retirement funds matching contributions, Bell said he doesn’t like the idea.
“We don’t think messing with people’s retirements benefits is a good way to keep up morale,” he said.
Bell said the district is in a hiring freeze. This came after the district’s announcement in July that 26 teachers and 19 paraeducators would be cut. He said each open position is being evaluated and being filled using existing employees or temporary ones, if possible.
He said one of the top-paid people in the facilities department plans to retire in about a year. Bell said that position will not be filled.
He said the district doesn’t have any underutilized buildings and they have tried outsourcing custodian services before, but it didn’t work.
“We’re not going to react. We are going to use a thoughtful process to work our way through it,” Bell said.
DONATIONS AND HARDSHIPS
He said the district is going to work to get more donations and fundraising to pay for extras, such as the Junior Achievement program, after school programs and computer bags that are needed for the one-to-one laptop initiative in Charlestown.
The district has received $35,800 in donations to help pay for Superintendent Stephen Daeschner’s $225,000 salary, which is short of the $75,000 goal, Bell said.
While all this is going on, Bell said the state is asking schools to do more with less, such as “real-time reporting,” where schools have to continually update the state on student absences. He said what used to take only a little bit of time to do quarterly reports is taking someone 40 hours a week to be focused on that one task.
“The legislators need to know what the real impact is,” he said, adding that was a change caused by them.
Collesano said another change is that schools need to pay out retirement benefits every two weeks as opposed to the previous schedule of every three months. He said that allows the state to make money in interest on those funds, where schools used to earn it before.
In addition, Bell said property taxes just paid to the district were $1.3 million short of what was expected, because of delinquent payments.
ADDRESSING THE ISSUE
Collesano said the administrative team is meeting every day to come up with a solution to this issue. He said he hopes for the team to have some answers by this summer.
“We have to manage it,” Bell said. “We have no choice. We will have a balanced budget.”
Collesano said that 10 percent of other funds, such as capital projects, can be used to go into the rainy-day fund and then to the general fund. However, he said it’s still $3 million less for the district and something will have to be cut.
Neither Collesano nor Bell would try to make a prediction on where those cuts will be made. However, the school board recently passed a contract with the teachers’ association that includes a clause saying that no teachers will be laid off because of the recent announcement of budget cuts from the state.
