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The First Cut is the Deepest, Part Three |
Bill Hudson | 2/8/10
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Read Part One
Last week, I took a quick look at the $2.3 million in budget reductions projected by the Archuleta School District for the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years. A portion of those reductions had been clearly foreseen several years ago, as the district watched its enrollment slowly dropping, from 1634 students in 2005, down to about 1475 this year.
That’s a 10 percent decline in enrollment over 4 years.
Because of a financial “averaging” formula, however, the district has not yet had to account fully for that enrollment drop — but next year, as everyone knew already, that drop will start to make a very significant impact.
On top of that, the state of Colorado is in the midst of a financial crisis and is cutting state support to public schools over the next two years.
“We’re kind of in the middle of the perfect storm of lack of funding,” said superintendent Mark DeVoti during last Wedneday’s Daily Post interview with writer Glenn Walsh and I, “because we’ve got the state cut, we’ve got the PERA [retirement fund] increase, and we lost the fifth year of our declining enrollment [averaging formula].
Most of these funding declines have been visible on the horizon, but now the moment of truth has arrived, and the Archuleta School Board will have to finally make some hard decisions.
 Some of those decisions will be discussed at tomorrow’s School Board meeting at 5pm in the Junior High Library. Mark DeVoti says he hopes the public will show up to offer their ideas — or at least to listen to the discussion.
Last Thursday and Friday, I wrote a bit about the superintendent’s thoughts on closing one of the district buildings — the oldest building, currently serving as the Intermediate School — and his thoughts, and mine, about a possible four-day school week.
Mark, Glenn and I had discussed other options as well — the sale of district-owned real estate, for example, was mentioned and then quickly dismissed, considering the state of the local real estate market.
We hit briefly on the topic of teacher layoffs — not an easy subject to talk about, since specific personnel decisions are “off topic” for a public institution, due to privacy concerns. But the subject is also problematic, due to the fact that teachers become “tenured” within the school district — so laying off the newest teachers, regardless of their talent and dedication, becomes the first order of business with any reduction in staff.
Unpaid furlough days were mentioned — possibly to take place at the very start and end of the school year, when no students are in attendance.
How about athletics? Are cuts in order for extracurricular sports?
How did competitive ball games become a central component of public school funding, in the first place?
When I attended Djursholm Samskola in Stockholm, Sweden as an exchange student during my senior year in high school, back in 1969, I was impressed by the amount of money apparently being spent by the Swedish government on public education. Our textbooks, for example, were not recycled books like they were in American high schools — the books “belonged” to us, the students, and we could freely use underlining and highlighting to help us with our studying. And we took our books home at the end of the year, just as a college student would here in America.
And there was no shame about getting a free lunch at Djursholm Samskola. Swedish schools provided free lunches for every student, poor or rich — and very tasty, nutritious lunches to boot.
Curiously, however, Djursholm Samskola did not have any sports teams. Apparently, the Swedish government had come to the conclusion that conducting competitive games like soccer and hockey was not a proper function of the public schools. Boys and girls who wanted to play competitive sports did so through privately-run sports clubs — on weekends.
Back here in America — at some point in our history — the folks running our public schools decided that organized, extracurricular team sports were, in fact, a necessary part of public education. Unlike most other aspects of public school education, however, extracurricular team sports serve only a small number of participants — and require a substantial amount of money for maintaining fields and equipment, paying coaches salaries, and busing that select number of kids over long distances to compete against other teams.
I’m not sure what portion of the district’s $17.9 million in general fund expenditures is allocated to extracurricular sports. I hope to find out more about that in the coming days. But Mark did indicate that cuts to the school sports program were under consideration.
For some young men and women, participation in extracurricular sports teams is probably their main reason for attending school instead of dropping out and looking for a job. But unlike training in math, reading and writing, a young person’s training in football or cheerleading rarely has any career-oriented application after high school is over. Competitive sports activities, in other words, are fun, and attractive to certain types of students — and provide a great deal of live entertainment for local sports audiences — but offer very little in the way of necessary “real-world” skills, in my opinion.
Are school sports a highly effective ‘drop-out prevention’ tool? I’m not sure.
Mark discussed not only possible changes in athletic program staffing, but also regionalizing games and tournaments to reduce the distances traveled during the season.
“What is it really about?” Mark asked rhetorically. “It’s about kids participating in sports, not necessarily about bus trips to Denver.”
Of course, the simplest solution to all these money problems is also the most controversial. The district could keep every single program in place, and every building open, and continue operate five day school weeks with no furlough days — if the staff were willing to accept a 10 percent salary decrease. If you contrast it with the number of people in Pagosa who have recently taken a 100 percent salary decrease — due to losing their jobs — a 10 percent pay cut doesn’t look so terrible on the face of it.
But I wouldn’t bet on anyone (except me) even suggesting such a thing.
In Part One, I originally referred to the projected $2.3 million drop in school funding as a "budget shortfall." In fact, that characterization was inaccurate. Technically, a "budget shortfall" can happen only after a budget is already approved — and the district has yet to approve its 2010-2011 budget. What we are looking at here is not a "shortfall" but simply a change in the amount of funding available. The district simply has to make some hard decisions about how to use the limited money available — as, indeed, all of us are doing here in Pagosa Springs.
At any rate, with massive budget cuts apparently waiting just over the horizon, and with particular interest groups looking at preserving certain favored programs, the School Board meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, February 9, could be an interesting one. |
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