Inver Grove Heights School Board Approves $576,000 in Budget Reductions

Just after he voted to approve roughly $576,000 in budget reductions for the Inver Grove Heights School District, School Board member Paul Mandell paused to reflect on the process.

 “None of us like making cuts,” said Mandell, who spoke for the seven-member board. “It’s probably the lowest point of the school board throughout the year.”

 While they may not like trimming the budget, the members of the school board found it necessary on Monday night to approve the cuts, which include the elimination of 12 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff positions in the district.

 The district, Superintendent Deirdre Wells said, is facing a general fund deficit between $346,000 and $1 million, depending on how much funding — or how little — state legislators choose to allocate to schools this spring.

 At a regular board meeting on Feb. 28, Wells to the board and an audience of at least 100 parents and community members. Included on the list were proposals to eliminate or reduce a number of staff positions in the district, increase activities fees and charge an optional fee for secondary students who live within a two-mile radius of the campus and choose to ride a bus.

 Administrators also presented a proposal to restructure and Elementary Schools, so that Salem Hills would house the pre-school through first-grade students from both schools, while second- through fifth-grade students from the two elementary schools would attend Hilltop. The board hasn’t yet taken action on that option, which is budget neutral but would help the district cope with potential sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act, Wells said.

 Instead, the board chose unanimously to eliminate or reduce a number of positions within the district, with the cuts falling heavily on the Special Ed program and other periphery services offered by the district. For details about the cuts, see the PDF file attached to this article.

Some of the positions that will be eliminated are held by tenured teachers. Those teachers, Wells said, will be shifted to other positions within the district.The district will save additional money this year after six tenured teachers retire. Five of those positions, Wells said, will be replaced with less expensive, untenured employees.

The school board stopped short of eliminating a coordinator for the district's Gifted and Talented program — a budget reduction proposal that raised the ire of numerous parents, who e-mailed board members to protest the move, officials said. Boardmember Phil Prokopowicz did not attend the meeting, and therefore did not cast a vote on the budget cuts.

"This is never easy, there’s small comfort in that not only are we not the only district going through this," said Boardmember Bridget Sutton, who predicted that problems in the way the state finances schools will prompt "radical" changes for schools.

“We are seeing the death of education as we know it, and the birth of a new style of education, " Sutton said.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

2011-2012 is hardly the first year the Inver Grove Heights School District has been forced to make cuts. Between 2000 and 2009, the district has approved $6,554,254 in budget cuts. The largest single budget reduction took place during the 2000-2001 school year, when district officials trimmed nearly $1.9 million from the books. Conversely, the smallest reduction occurred in the 2003-2004 school year, when the board approved $403,000 in cuts.