School District 51 (SD51) announced that it will have to cut more than a half million dollars to balance the 2011/2012 budget, this despite funding levels staying the same as last year.
The announcement was made at a school board finance meeting last week where the budget was proposed.
Funding protection has kept funding the same as last year but other cost pressures have led to the proposed cuts of $609,822.
Secretary-Treasurer Jeanette Hanlon said that the pressures were items such as an increase in salary costs for teachers, benefits, supply costs and other services, such as special needs.
Hanlon asked for ideas to solve the budget issues that will likely lead to staff and teacher cuts if the budget can’t be balanced any other way.
“We have less kids at GFSS so that was the main cut there,” Hanlon said of the reduction of teaching staff there.
In the proposal, the budget for teaching staff was reduced by $229,000 and $93,500 for non-teaching. Substitute teaching would see a $35,000 decrease.
“This last year’s been a bad year for substitute policy,” Hanlon said, since the budget for them had to be cut by the $35,000.
“It is $75,000 more than we budgeted last year at this time. We did have a bad year but I’m hoping that next year’s going to be better,” she added.
She said that three years ago they had reduced the funding for school supplies, then increased them again and kept them steady last year; this year the funds for supplies will be cut by $43,500.
This still leaves a $208,952 shortfall that Hanlon hopes can be solved, but administration is still being looked at.
The operating budget is $15,717,834, which is exactly that of last year.
SD51 Superintendent Michael Strukoff said that to balance the budget, the district had kept the budget pretty tight, coming in at a surplus of just over $230,000 from the $15.7 million of the 2009/2010 budget. Hanlon estimates that puts the contingency at about $650,000.
Strukoff added: “The dilemma for the district is we don’t want to go into the red.”
He also addressed comments that cuts to teaching should be dispersed to higher levels. He said that there were many complaints that some schools in the district don’t have full-time staff that parents would like, such as a full-time principal.
The board will still have to approve the budget at the May 3 finance meeting.
The other part of the meeting concerned the community engagement committee, which centered on the state of education.
Strukoff said that because of it changing rapidly, especially concerning new technology, the education system might need some changes to keep up.
Strukoff noted that skills that were once fundamental, like typewriting and cursive, are now obsolete. He discussed the issue of updating the school programs and the need to adapt, using typing as an example.
“We don’t even do that now, kids learn at home before they even really need to do it at school,” Strukoff said.
The ideas come from schools in places like Finland, where teachers have much more control over the content of their classes and students learn at their own levels.
Strukoff said that while the core subjects like math, reading and writing would stay the same, the outer courses could include more choices for students to find something they enjoy studying.
“What we are seeing is that we don’t have the same passion for learning from our kids. They know they need to get through high school,” he said.
“They’re getting by but we’re not seeing them embracing their education in a way that we think would be best for them to get positive results.”
Strukoff noted that the process was only in the beginning of the discussion stages and would need approval from many levels in the educational system.