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The First Cut is the Deepest, Part One |
Bill Hudson | 2/4/10
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Mark DeVoti hopes the public will show up for next Tuesday’s Archuleta School District Board of Education meeting, to address some big ideas about ways to cut the district budget by $2.3 million over the next two years.
That’s the dollar amount suggested by the state of Colorado in recent notifications — informing Colorado school districts that due to the $2.2 billion revenue "shortfall" in the total state budget, each of the 178 school districts in Colorado are facing an 8 to 10 percent funding decline for the 2010-2011 school year. About 43 percent of the state budget is allocated for public education.
Additionally, due to changes in the state’s PERA retirement system, DeVoti and his staff are planning for a further loss of revenue: $63,000 for the 2010-2011 school year.
But the fun doesn’t stop there.
Archuleta School District 50-Joint has been losing enrollment for the past few years — a drop which some observers attribute to families leaving Pagosa Springs due to lack of available jobs. Because the state allows districts to “average” their enrollment declines, the Archuleta district has been able to receive state funding at a level slightly higher than the district’s actual enrollment. That “five year averaging” advantage has now run its course, and the district is looking at a $287,000 funding drop based on that formula.
Add it all up, and the district will be down about $1.3 million for the next school year.
DeVoti and his staff also estimate an additional $1 million will have to be cut for the 2011-2012 school year — for a grand total over 2 years of $2.3 million in programming and staff cuts.
If that two year decline were made up by simply laying off teaching staff, the district would have to let about 46 teachers go. But that solution is apparently not one of the proposals that will be suggested at next Tuesday’s meeting.
 I first heard about the $2.3 million decline when I stopped in at a casual meeting of parents at the River Pointe Coffee Café, overlooking the partially-frozen San Juan River. School board member Joanne Irons had invited some fellow parents there to discuss the impending funding drop, and brainstorm ways to cut school funding without affecting the primary mission of the district:
“To empower students to achieve personal and academic successes in a safe and appropriate learning environment, while providing them with the tools to effectively navigate in the 21st century.”
It appeared that Joanne — one of the more community-centric members of the current School Board — was gathering a laundry list of parent-supported ideas to bring to next Tuesday’s meeting.
The brainstorming ideas thrown around at the parents’ meeting had included some obvious solutions as well as some fairly ‘outside the box’ proposals — converting to a four-day school week, making families pay for school bus rides, eliminating buses altogether, cutting administration staff, closing school buildings, consolidating grades, raising deductibles for health insurance, laying off teachers, cutting sports teams, and perhaps the most daring proposal of all: going to Archuleta County voters and asking for more money.
I sensed that the group understood a plea to voters for additional taxes would almost certainly fall on deaf ears, unless the school district were already showing a massive effort to solve the funding problems internally.
I found it curious that no one suggested cuts to the arts and music curriculum — areas that have been prime targets during previous recessions.
As I walked out of that meeting and into the bright winter sunshine, I realized a meeting with district superintendent Mark DeVoti was in order. With serious fiscal issues like this facing the district, I could well imagine the administration would be coming to Tuesday’s meeting with some ideas of its own — whether or not the public showed up.
Daily Post writer Glenn Walsh — who also happened to be one of the parents who’d attended Joanne Iron’s earlier meeting — joined me in Mark’s office, a 12x16 room in a very modest modular building on Lewis Street, with a view of a meager parking lot and loading dock, and one brick wall of the Intermediate School.
Not your typical executive office suite.
Mark started off the discussion by printing out the informational letter he had recently sent out to teachers and staff, summarizing the budget crisis.
You can click here to view that letter as a PDF file.
“Two big discussion points for the Tuesday meeting,” Mark began. “Closing the Intermediate School, to start with. In talking with people — and for good reasons — it makes a lot of sense to move the fifth grade back into the Elementary School.”
The Intermediate School, comprised of fifth and sixth graders, is currently housed in the oldest of the district’s four school buildings, a remarkably sturdy brick building facing the highway in the center of downtown, and built in 1928 I believe.. That old building is possibly in the best physical shape of any school building in town, save perhaps ten-year-old High School at the end of Eight Street.
The Intermediate School building had once housed all twelve grades here in Pagosa Springs, back in the day.
Mark spoke about closing that brick building and moving the sixth graders into the Junior High, a less dependable concrete block structure on the same downtown block as the Intermediate School and sharing the same playground. The Junior High would then become a “Middle School” in the standard educational jargon, meaning a school housing sixth, seventh and eight graders.
The Elementary School could easily accommodate the fifth grades next year, because — as another part of the budgeting process — the district is eliminating the five “math specialists” at the Elementary School, who had been added a few years ago to try and boost the district’s math scores on CSAP tests — and, incidentally, to give Elementary teachers a “planning period” similar to the planning time enjoyed by their colleagues at the other school buildings.
Funny, I don’t recall my elementary school teachers requiring a “planning period” when I attended grade school in the 1960s. But times have changed, perhaps. We also didn’t have to make superior scores on a bank of standardized tests back in those days. Perhaps achieving great test scores requires additional planning?
Those five “math specialists” had been given their own classrooms at the Elementary School — classrooms that will now be open for use by the fifth grades. The specialists themselves will likely become ordinary classroom teachers next year, perhaps filling slots left by retiring teachers.
But what about that Elementary School building? I asked Mark. Isn’t that the most troubled building in the district? I’d heard about serious leaks — and classrooms with a dozen or more buckets sitting around the the floor, catching the drips as the snow melted on the flat roof.
Mark had some good news about that troubled roof, which had been replaced just a couple of years ago. Apparently, the roofing contractor, a Cleveland, Ohio based company called The Garland Company, had done a partial job during the last installation — replacing only the sub-roof, at the district’s request, to save the cost of a fully finished roof. Garland has guaranteed the sub-roof for five years, and apparently that guarantee didn’t hold water.
The contractor had started work on Tuesday, to fix the roof — at no charge to the district.
So maybe the fifth grade will have a dry place to hold classes next year.
Another major piece of a possible budget crisis solution, which Mark hopes will be discussed at next Tuesday’s School Board meeting, is the four-day school week.
Read Part Two... |
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