Schools to whack $2.4 million to balance budget

 

Teacher jobs on the line this time

 

 

By MARY EVA CASSADA

Special to The News & Record

Trustees and administrators say whittling $2.4 million off their proposed 2008-09 budget will be a daunting task and may subtract teaching jobs. “This is probably the most difficult budget I’ve ever had to deal with,” said Halifax County Schools Superintendent Paul Stapleton. “We got zapped from both sides,” he added, referring to no teacher pay increases from the state and not as much funding as Trustees had sought from the county Board of Supervisors.

For the first time in his Halifax tenure, Stapleton said, full-time teaching slots may be vulnerable, and it may come down to pay raises versus jobs. The Trustees had agreed that boosting teacher salaries was their top priority for the coming year, but accomplishing that goal may be a stretch. “Some kind of raise is do-able but … that’s going to mean cutting pretty deep,” Stapleton said. It takes $400,000 to give teachers even a one-percent pay hike, said

Finance Director Bill Covington. “I think it’s extra tight,” Covington said of the budget. The Trustees “will have to at least look at things they never looked at before.” “There are not a lot of areas outside personnel that can be looked at,” added Covington, noting that so many items are mandated. If positions are lost, Covington said, he hoped it could be done through attrition. “Everything is on the table to recoup the deficit in our budget,” said Deputy Superintendent Larry Clark. “We would like to maintain our pupil-teacher ratio,” said Clark, “but sometimes the deficit is so great … you have to look at the classroom teachers.” Personnel accounts for about 75 percent of most any school division’s budget, Covington said. Non-mandatory programs like sports, band or art could be trimmed, but “no school board likes to cut established programs,” Stapleton said. Apparently not on the table in Stapleton’s opinion is closing more schools, as the board did last year to fill brand-new schools and to save money.

“My personal feeling is we can’t do that right now,” he said, saying the elementaries are fairly full. Clark said only modest pay hikes or no hike at all will not help his teacher recruiting efforts. Clark, who is in charge of human resources, has been especially vocal in the past year about losing potential prospects to higher-paying districts, even neighboring districts in Southside. In addition to limited flow from state and local funding sources, the

school division has been rocked by high fuel prices, the declining national economy and is bracing for news on its health insurance premiums, which are expected to rise. Stapleton said the Board probably will set one or two more budget work sessions to work through the process. The administration likes to have contracts out by April 15, but conceded that would be impossible this year. “We got a $2.4 million hole in the budget,” Stapleton said. Filling it

“is not easy to do, I’m afraid.”

 

 

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