Final Assignment Part 1 Jessica Vilorio University of New England EDU 709 2013 Summer B Professor Prince

Running Title: Final Assignment Part 1 School and district budgets are careful balancing acts that school officials, program directors, and finance officers carefully walk on a yearly basis. Like in a normal household, they cannot spend more money than is coming in from revenue sources, can face sudden setbacks, and need to able to know what can be cut, if needed, in the face of budget cuts. (Odden & Picus, 2008) As I learned from my interview with Mr. Larry Jackson, Director of Budgeting Services for Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools, and Ms. Judy Marty, principal for Mater Academy Middle High, schools get their money from three different sources. The first of those sources is the state which gives the district/school a fixed amount of money per students. The second source is the local tax base and is based off of taxable property in the county, while the third source is the federal government which provides grants and money for various mandated programs. The budget process actually starts up to ten months before the new fiscal year so the majority of revenue is actually estimated and is subject to change based off of the actual amount of taxable property and the exact number of students in the school once the academic year starts. As was gleamed from the various interviews, although the schools start following the new budget before the academic year starts, the state revenue can change once student enrollment is officially calculated in September. This means that the budget can be cut or reinforced mid-year. For this assignment, we were tasked with cutting 3% from a school budget. In this case, I had to work with the overall Beaufort County School District - South Carolina budget from fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2014. Available to me was also data dating back to fiscal year 2010. When I originally looked at the assignment, I thought that it would be easy to take 3% out of the budget, but then I realized that I would need to find $5,487,180 to take out of the district

Running Title: Final Assignment Part 1 budget and, all of a sudden, the task seemed infinitely harder. I remembered my second year of teaching when an assistant principal told me that my position would need to be eliminated midyear because the school no longer had the money and I was the last one in. I thought, "how hard can it be to find roughly $18,000 (we were in the middle of the year)?" The principal, Ms. Marty, later told me that I had to calculate benefits and various taxes that the school paid to keep me employed. She ended up finding the money in her budget, but later told me that she was faced with sacrificing something from the operating budget that would possibly affect instruction or asking the teachers to give up the second part of their extra period supplement. Luckily, the teachers in question agreed to give up that extra money, but after looking at this assignment I realize the position that she was in and the hardship. Sadly, the first place that I looked was at staff. I know that there are certain programs and departments that need to keep their full funding due to state and federal mandates and requirements. (Odden & Picus, 2008) Certain programs have to retain their staff and I needed to look at the minimum and maximum ratios for students to teachers and to administrators. Each school must have a principal, but the averages for other positions vary by student population and grades that the school in question serves. In an elementary school, the teacher to student ratio is 1 teacher for every 24 students. For over 750 students, the school needs more than one assistant principal and guidance counselor. All schools have one nurse, media specialist, media assistant, and computer lab assistant. There is one support staff member for every 750 students. Middle schools are very similar, but on average they were allocated a support staff member for every 250 students. In addition, each school shares a data specialist with another school (the split hours were created after budget during fiscal year 2011). Middle schools rate a part time counselor and a part time assistant principal for every 250 students, as do high schools. Middle

Running Title: Final Assignment Part 1 schools and high schools also rate a behavior interventionist. High schools do rate a part time testing chair though and an athletic director. However, it is harder for them to get a media assistant or nurse assistant than for a middle school or elementary school. The ratio for students to teachers in a middle school is 21 to 1 and for a high school is 20.5 to 1. It has been publicized in Beaufort County that they were closing two schools and downsizing their school administrative staff. That knowledge helped with the first of my budget cuts. Reductions in force amongst school administrators resulted in a $620,155 change from fiscal year 2013 to 2014. The next change that I would make is to freeze the salary schedule steps for early childhood, kindergarten, primary, elementary, middle, and high school faculty and staff. I would also freeze the salary schedule steps for support staff and gifted and talented program faculty and staff. Unfortunately, I would also need to predict student enrollment numbers and assume that they would remain the same or have very little change from fiscal year 2013. By freezing the salary steps for the teachers and support staff, while making a dangerous assumption, I could cut $2,615,640. When added to the reduction in force for administrators, that equals $3,235,795 from the budget. After stopping the salary steps for faculty and staff in some programs, I faced tough decisions on where I could pull another $2.2 million. There were several programs that were being downsized or reinstated within the district but they were either mandated or being paid for with grants. I faced a situation that Odden and Picus described on the hardships of ranking programs and departments based on importance. I saw that $56,249 was going to instructional programs beyond the regular day. I know that charter schools could charge parents for instruction beyond the regular day unless it was for tutoring in regards to standardized testing, but I wasn't sure if public schools could. I decided to cut off funding to those programs to bring my total cuts up to

Running Title: Final Assignment Part 1 $3,292,044. As a district, we could determine if the after school instruction was something that parents could help subsidize or if a grant for tutoring could be secured. After eliminating a program and freezing pay, I still had $2,195,136 to cut in order to reach the 3% budget cut. I made another very difficult decision to reduce funding for supplies for several programs by 17.5%. Odden and Picus stated in their text that districts try to avoid wiping out funding in general for some programs and that instead school finance officers will sometimes ask program and site administrators to consider what they would cut if they had to take between a 5% and 20% budget cut in one area. An assistant principal told me that he would look at supplies because you could use some things for several years before needing to replace them and because some supplies are one time purchases. With the assistant principals advice in mind, I cut funds for supplies kindergarten, primary, elementary, middle, high school, and vocational programs. I also cut supplies for learning disability, early childhood, and gifted programs. Attendance and social work programs also lost supply funds as well as guidance services, psychological services, and literacy and media services. The improvement of instruction office also lost funds for supplies. The staff development program, board of education, and office of the superintendent also took of a reduction of funds for supplies by 17.5%. School administration, operations and maintenance, staff services, technology and data processing, and pupil service activities were the last programs and departments to take a 17.5% in funding for supplies. Those cuts in funding would eliminate another $2,204,795 from the budget. In total, I was tasked with reducing the fiscal year 2013 budget by 3% for fiscal year 2014. In order to achieve this, I had to eliminate roughly $5,487,180 from the Beaufort County School District overall budget. With a planned reduction in force among administrators, freezing

Running Title: Final Assignment Part 1 the salary steps for several groups, and imposing a 17.5% cut in funds for supplies from multiple programs and offices, I was able to able to save $5,496,839. This left me with $9,659 dollars that could be injected back into the budget or be used as additional overhead. I know that budget cuts are never popular and are hard on everyone. If student enrollment increases, we could put money back into the budget where supplies or salary were cut. In addition, we could look into federal and private grant programs that would allow for us to move funds from one area to another.

Works Cited

http://www.beaufort.k12.sc.us/files/_nDIcN_/abec5e143f8a91f83745a49013852ec4/FY14_Budgetall_programs_detail.pdf

Odden, A. & Picus, L. (2008). School finance: a policy perspective. (4th ed.). New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Rosa, M. (2010). Educational economics: Where do school funds go? [Kindle version]