Pinching pennies: School board and community committee take close look at budget

Teachers, parents, community members and school district officials spent nearly four hours looking closely at the budget, trying to find ways to cut and provide the best possible education for students.

“I don’t think anyone is here because they don’t care about the kids,” said Carbon County School District No. 2 Board Chairman Greg Bartlett in the March 26 meeting.

CCSD 2 and a newly formed committee agreed to meet for the budget discussion, after the Encampment community learned the full-time art teacher position at Encampment School was going to be cut to a half-time position.

Bartlett revealed in the meeting the board’s plan was to cut about $200,000 from the district’s budget, or two full-time teaching positions.

“We probably went about this the wrong way,” Bartlett said. “We asked what would least affect people and salaries. What we should have said is what would least affect the students in the classroom.”

Bartlett said the school board had previous meetings where they discussed cutting personnel. The idea was to save money without affecting current staffing.

When the art teacher at Encampment announced her retirement, the school board knew one current teacher who could teach art half time, Bartlett said. The school board also thought it could take the full-time librarian at Saratoga Elementary School and use her to fill an open teaching position. The librarian position could then be filled half time by the Saratoga Junior/Senior High School’s librarian.

“It was an easy look to say we could have one librarian between two schools, put one teacher in the classroom and nobody loses their job,” Bartlett said.

The school board also looked at cutting a position at HEM Junior/Senior High School.

“That was the original idea of how the whole process got started,” Bartlett said. “That obviously didn’t go over well.”

The district’s business manager Sally Wells used most of the meeting explaining, in detail, the budget and school budgeting in general to the committee and other concerned parties. Bartlett then took the floor and revealed problem areas in the budget.

“We have three main areas where we are totally under funded for,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett identified those areas as school lunch, health insurance and school activities.

Bartlett said the school district is $150,000 in the red for health insurance, $150,000 in the red for activities and about $250,000 in the red for school lunches.

CCSD 2 is one of very few districts in the state that pay out 100 percent for health insurance, Bartlett said.

Unfortunately, the district can’t keep doing that, Bartlett said.

“Health insurance is a way we can help solve this,” Bartlett said.

Cutting activities is harder because of the nature of the district, Bartlett said.

Most districts should have one set of teams, but CCSD 2 has three sets of teams.

The district has looked at ways to offset the deficit, Bartlett said. One option the school board explored was a “pay to play” approach, Bartlett said.

High School students who want to participate in activities and sports would pay a one-time fee of $150 per year. Junior high students would pay $75 per year.

“That gets us some” money, Bartlett said.

However, the district believes the dropout rate would go up tremendously if it put the one-time activity fee into place, namely in Hanna, Bartlett said.

“The socioeconomic status of Hanna is very different than anywhere else,” Bartlett said. “A lot of them can’t afford to pay the fee.”

The district also looked at limiting team’s overnight trips and each student has to pay their first meal.

Enacting all of those cuts would reduce the activities deficit to $50,000, Bartlett said.

“It’s a start,” he said.

The place where the district overspends the most is school lunches, Bartlett said.

“I think everyone would agree it’s always a good thing to subsidize food to allow our children to eat,” Bartlett said.

Each lunch costs the school about $5 to make, but students who pay for lunch pay $2.50. The rest of the cost for lunch is carried by the school district.

However, the district gets $2.86 per meal for students who get free lunch in a federal program. The district also gets $1.55 for those who get reduced-priced lunch. Most students don’t sign up for free or reduced lunch, Wells said in the meeting.

“It’s a misconception that if you apply for free and reduced meals, you are asking for welfare,” Wells said. “It’s not. If you fill out those free and reduced applications, it helps your school.”

The committee and school district officials wrapped up the meeting by pitching some ideas on how to cut the lunch program.

Committee member Jeb Steward thanked Bartlett and Wells for showing them the budget.

“The goal of this group was to find other alternatives, and you have actually helped this group form some of these alternatives other than what was being contemplated at the last meeting,” Steward said. “I think you made our job easier.”

Bartlett said he wants to work with the school board to schedule a workshop meeting for community members. The committee scheduled to meet again at 3:45 p.m., Tuesday, at Encampment School.

 

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