You have mentioned salaries, but what are some other cuts than need to be made?

Jim Grabusky: I would step back and take an analytical look at it. You need to look at how to fund things to make the school strong and the community good. Instead of looking at what can be cut and what can’t, I’d like to take the opposite approach and look at how we can pay for these things.

Jeffrey Dimmig: The farther you get from the classroom the greater we can cut spending. We purchased two $60 thousand laser engravers last year. One was for a 4^th grade classroom. We don’t need that. I voted against it. $60 thousand, that’s a teacher, folks. That’s where we can find savings. As we get farther from the classroom. They want to build a new central office building. Who’s that for? Just administrators. Again, I’d be against that.

William Lycett: The pensions are probably the biggest issue that’s facing, not only the school district, but facing your local, county, state governments. Now they have to show that it’s funded. And it has to be funded to pay for the pensions, which is something the teachers signed up for, that the school board signed up for that’s got to be addressed. And that’s probably the biggest issue next to salaries. But I think also you have to look at how the money is being sent. Every time I walk into the intermediate school I wonder why there are television sets in there that aren’t being used? Where could it be better spent in the district? I think you’ve got to question things. There has to be alternatives and there has to be two or three different solutions in how to fund something, or do you need it?

John Quigley: The pension the cost is pretty significant. That’s going to quintuple in the next couple of years. That’s a train wreck coming. In the past I’ve suggested a great way to generate revenue is to get corporate sponsorship. The board has opposed this consistently because they don’t want a company’s name on any of our buildings or on our fields. I think corporate sponsors would love to be involved.

Corrine A. Gunkle: I think one of the biggest challenges we face, as a district, and actually our entire state faces, is the teacher pension being under-funded. This is a huge debt that we know is out there and it is one of the things we get in trouble with in budget finance. It’s kind of like sending your kid to college. You know it’s going to cost a lot of money. You can’t pay for the whole thing right now, but you don’t want sit there and cover your eyes and do nothing, so you try to put some money towards it. In our budgets we have been trying to prepare for the fact that the current amount we are contributing is insufficient for teacher retirement.  And it’s a commitment. Pensions are a commitment. Currently we paid 5% a year and a study from the pension people say that we’re going to need to pay 20-25%, so currently we’re paying a million dollars and we are going to need to be paying five million dollars. I think one of the things we need to do is start putting pressure on Harrisburg to start to address this problem because it’s a huge issue and there’s a lot of uncertainty at how to handle it.

Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and grammar. Content has remained unchanged.