District to Cut $4.6 Million, Plans for Future

The school board unanimously passed a budget option recommended by Superintendent Terry Noble and Deputy Superintendent Eric Knost that would freeze teacher salaries, reconfigure bus routes and reduce Parents As Teachers (PAT), but allocates spending for future needs and keeps literacy coaches.

The cuts, which include the transition from a three-tier to four-tier transportation system, would eliminate 12 bus driver positions. The budget also will keep two to four literacy coaches and a Response To Intervention (RTI) facilitator. 

The reductions (shown below), totaling $4.6 million, factor in a loss of stimulus funds and predicted state funding. The biggest savings come from freezing the salaries of current employees, reducing staff through attrition and reorganizing the Central Office and administrative positions.

The district will aim to save $900,000 by reducing teachers, mostly through the district’s . Through the program, 26 certified staff have announced their retirements after the current school year.

The Central Office will also be reorganizing, losing an assistant superintendent position. An assistant principal position at each high school will also be eliminated.

“This is the way you make cuts to staff with having minimal impact on the kids,” Knost said. “It may cause some moving around.”

The proposed 2011-2012 budget option allowed for reserve spending for unpredicted facilities expenses, an e-Learning initiative and replacing the fire alarm systems in both of the high schools, totaling $2 million.

“We’re not going to go out tomorrow and spend these things,” Knost said. “We know the fire alarms are coming, the fire inspector has been good enough to warn us this is coming in the next few years, possibly next.”

The board voted to proceed with the budget with the understanding that the $2 million in items listed were being allocated and not spent until necessary.

“We’ve had a pretty tall order to cut $4.6 million of out an already lean budget,” Knost said. “Our goal was to keep it as far away from the classroom as possible."

Most school districts have gone immediately to reducing staff for their budget cuts, he said. Protecting the staff and keeping the classroom intact was the administration’s top priority when considering the budget.

If all allocated funds are used, the district’s reserves will fall to 12.69 percent. The state benchmark for a reserve balance is 17 percent, Noble said, with the state stepping in if the district falls below 3 percent.

Both superintendents and the board thought it was necessary to plan ahead for future expenses.

“We’ve got our budgets so lean in our facilities, if a boiler or HVAC went out next winter, we’d be taking it out of the reserves anyway,” Knost said.

If the money for extra expenses is not spent, the reserve balance will stay at the present 14 to 15 percent range.

The district will be spending $500,000 on keeping literacy coaches and RTI facilitators.

The literacy coaches were initially hired out of stimulus funds, and were never a permanent fixture in the budget.

We’ve fallen in love with the literacy coaches and what they’ve done for our children, board member Drew Frauenhoffer said at the meeting.

Knost said the district could keep two to four literacy coaches as well as a RTI facilitator. RTI is a district program that takes a tiered approach to help diagnose learning disabilities with students. Data is broken down for each student and they are moved up a pyramid-like system, rather than sending them directly to the Special School District.

Using the program, the number of students who have been diagnosed as learning disabled has diminished significantly, Noble said. Instead, they are given extra help and an individualized education plan. 

“We should thank the community for Prop T in 2008 cause that really saved us from having to do more,” Noble said. “We’d be furloughing teachers and doing everything else right now had we not had the $5 million boost into our budget.”

“We’ve dealt with it from a worst-case scenario and hopefully things will actually pan out a little better than what we’ve planned,” Knost said.

Mehlville School District Budget Reductions