By Johnna Pinholster
The Valdosta Daily Times
August 21, 2008 01:34 am
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VALDOSTA — The State of Georgia will be cutting public education budgets after all.
Area school systems are in the middle of devising plans to absorb the 2 percent cut handed down earlier in the month.
LOWNDES COUNTY SCHOOLS
Superintendent Dr. Steve Smith felt that the public schools would be exempted from the budget cuts that affected the other government funded entities across the state.
“We were hoping that the signs of the economy would be more favorable and that we could avoid the budget cuts for education,” Smith said.
Now the system is bracing for a $1,028,643 in budget reductions for the current fiscal year.
The fiscal year for the school, dubbed Fiscal Year 2009, began July 1 and runs through June 30 of 2009, Smith said.
“The important thing to realize is the cuts do not effect salaries,” Smith said. “Anywhere from 85 to 88 percent of a school system is comprised of salaries, so that only leaves a 12 to 15 percent window for us to decide where the budget cuts should come from.”
The cuts will also not effect teacher salaries or pay raises, he said.
“The bulk of where our budget cuts are going to come from will be in the area of operations,” Smith said.
Smith said one of his mandates regarding budget cuts is to not cut funds that will impact direct instruction.
Operations including facilities, transportation, maintenance and custodial will receive most of the budget cuts, he said.
To cover the cuts, Smith said, some funds may be pulled from the system’s fund reserve, a savings account for the system.
The LCS property has also been reassessed and the value has increased he said, something that will help soften the impact of the budget cuts.
“One of the real difficult things is that had we known that we were going to incur these budget cuts we would have rolled the millage rate back to the roll back rate,” Smith said.
The system rolled the millage back to 14.70 mills, if it had rolled back the rate to 14.906 mills the system would have had two tenths more mills to work with, Smith said.
“But we didn’t know about the cuts at the time and we wanted to give the tax payers as much relief as we could,” Smith said.
The LCS budget was set in May.
“The way we will survive the budget cuts is really the result of our being good stewards of the tax payers money and we have an adequate fund equity that will be able to help us out during some of the difficult times,” Smith said.
Between $300,000 and $500,000 could be pulled from the fund reserve to cover cost.
Field trips will also be restricted, with two per year per grade. One trip has to be within a 50 mile radius of Valdosta and the other can be an extended trip, he said.
The LCS school board will not have to approve the budget cuts, but Smith said that they were made aware of the cuts at the Aug. 11 board meeting.
While the 2 percent cut is unwelcome, Smith said they have been handling cuts from the government for seven years through state mandated austerity cuts .
The state has also warned school systems that another cut could come in 2010.
Smith said during hard economic times the teacher-pupil ratio is often increased and moved closer to the maximum, which varies from grade to grade.
The system is currently well below the teacher-pupil ratio, but teaching positions made vacant at the end of next year may not be refilled, Smith said.
This would cut costs and also bring the teacher-pupil ratio up. Systems are not permitted to go over the state recommended ratio or they are forced to hire teachers to bring it down.
“We won’t lay people off but what we will do is we won’t replace positions just because there is a vacancy,” Smith said.
Valdosta City Schools
While not yet sure where the budget cuts will come from, the Valdosta City School System expects to lose $730,000 from their current budget.
Superintendent Dr. Bill Cason said these funds will be cut from the budget along with the $1 million dollar austerity cut taken by the state each year.
Austerity cuts were put in place by the state six years ago, Cason said. The state withholds a portion of what a system actually earns based on the student population.
The system is cited as having earned the money but it is immediately taken by the sate and put back into the state treasury.
“We haven’t set down at this point to determine exactly where the cuts will come from,” Cason said. “Of course we will look at attrition and not re-filling positions unless it is a critical position.”
Cason said he hopes to cut funds outside of the instructional area first.
“I want to try to avoid, if we possibly can, cutting anything that has to do with instruction,” he said.
While Cason said VCS could dip into their fund balance, their reserve fund, he does not consider it a good option for the system.
Budgets are built on certain millage rates and to build a fund balance a system raises millage rates, Cason said.
“We certainly don’t want to do that,” Cason said. “This would have been much easier to handle had we known that it was coming before we set the millage rate for this year and adopted a budget for this year.”
Cason said superintendents across the region will be meeting in the next couple weeks to further discuss different avenues for trimming system budgets to absorb the 2 percent cut.
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