By PAT NEWMAN
pnewman@thecitizennews.com

The impact of House Bill 1187, Gov. Roy Barnes' education reform package, is starting to be felt by Fayette County school officials as they prepare the fiscal year 2001 budget.

“We're starting to find out what the impact of all this reform is going to be,” Superintendent John DeCotis told the Fayette County Board of Education Monday night. “There will be an increase in the money received from the state, but a good deal of it is going to increases in medical costs; it doesn't leave a lot,” he said referring to the jump in insurance costs for school district employees.

School finance director Jim Stephens presented an overview of some of the state-mandated reforms and the results to be felt locally. He prefaced his remarks by stating, “No one is complaining; we don't need to have our hands slapped... but the reforms present some challenges,” Stephens said.

He was referring to the governor's censure of the board that oversees Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools. Barnes accused that board of misspending funds that should have been used to hire teachers in an effort to lower class size, and questioned why a tax hike would be necessary to provide the funds to implement his plan when the money has been funneled into their coffers all along.

Fayette County Board of Education Chairman Debbie Condon called the letter “inappropriate.” “This whole thing is scary,” Condon said. “I'm very concerned.”

Stephens said the state will expand its control over local funding through a series of “tests” which are designed to assure that state money allocated for a particular area, such as instruction, be used solely for that purpose. “That should not be a problem; we're doing that already,” Stephens said.

But monthly state payments that identify each school within a system and the amount it receives could pose some difficulties, according to Stephens. “If we have a maintenance worker, say a heating and air conditioning specialist, we need to account for how much money is spent on each worker in each school,” DeCotis explained. Stephens concurred that this would be the process if the plan were carried out with the highest degree of compliance, but at this time, there was no “test” in the system for this particular area. “We'll keep it simple,” Stephens said.

Board member Greg Powers said he was worried that “older schools are going to suffer” with less maintenance under the plan, and also that there would be a “lot of potential for returning funds back to the state.”

“The state has not worked out all the details yet,” DeCotis said of the education reform package, which passed the legislature last month. “One of the issues... is to limit money moving around... they [state] want the money spent on what it's designated for... we have pretty much been doing that. Sometimes you have to move things around. It cuts down on flexibility on systems [like Fayette] that have been meeting previous guidelines,” DeCotis said.

The board is eyeing a June 1 deadline for having its new budget ready. The first draft calls for $124 million, about $6.4 million higher than this year's midyear adjusted budget of 116.3 million. Stephens attributed the hike to a $2.5 million increase in health insurance, $2 million for teacher pay raises, approximately $500,000 in pay raises for classified employees and additional funds for new construction.