Wednesday, March 19, 2003
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Wednesday, March 19, 2003 |
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Fayette schools face budget cuts By J. FRANK LYNCH
Fayette County schools are in stable enough financial footing right now that even with expected cuts in funding from the Georgia Legislature, minimum state requirements on classroom size can still be met. But in Fayette County, just meeting state standards has never been good enough, Superintendent John DeCotis told board members Monday. And that means tough choices ahead as the school system fine-tunes its budget for the coming year. "We have always been ahead of all the requirements the state passes down because our standards are just higher," DeCotis said. "How our budget turns out is going to depend on how far we want to stay ahead." System comptroller Jim Stephens told the board at the regular monthly meeting that red-pen work at the local level is being delayed while the legislature finalizes the full state budget. Lawmakers are in recess until Monday as hearings on the budget continue. But rumors are trickling down, Stephens said, like a proposal to eliminate the funding of school nurses, which means $400,000 to Fayette County. What's not a rumor is the severity of the state's budget crisis, offered up by Gov. Sonny Perdue in his version of the budget in January. With severe declines in state revenue, many of the state's 188 school systems are scrambling to find local funds to meet even the minimum requirements for student-teacher ratios and the like. Georgia funds its schools through a formula based on "Full Time Equivalents" basically, the total number of full-time, resident students enrolled in each system on a particular day of the year. That enrollment is divided by what the state determines is the ideal ratio of students to teacher, and then funds the resulting number of teaching spots per school district. So any expenses beyond the state's predetermined "minimum" must be done at home. In that respect, Fayette County is better off than many of its neighbors, said board member Greg Powers, who recently attended a gathering of the Georgia School Boards Association to discuss the legislative budget situation. "I wasn't there to sing the blues," Powers said. "Most systems are taxed out, and I was there to tell them that Fayette County is as tax-rich as it ever was." But that's no reason to relax, because Fayette still stands to take in millions less from the state next year which must be made up somewhere or cut altogether. To put it in perspective, DeCotis pointed out that 266 classroom teacher positions in Fayette County are funded entirely on the local level. If that money has to be used to make up state shortfalls, he asked, how can the board continue to pay those salaries? "In the overall numbers of students in classrooms at each grade level, yes we can maintain state standards with our current revenue," he said. "But part of our advantage in teaching our students has always been that when the state lowers the minimum requirements, we lower our requirements." But the salary equation extends beyond the classroom. Stephens said that nearly half of all paid positions in county elementary schools are non-teacher positions like support personnel, food service workers, library aides and not state funded. "Our support personnel have never been properly funded to start with," Stephens said. "Things like building upkeep, computer upgrades those are all needs the state doesn't address. We're going to have to make some hard choices." Stephens said his department is still going over proposed budgets submitted by principals at each school, and once he knows how much to expect on the state level, the tough work of slashing here and there can begin. Powers asked if the board could rely on overall growth in the county's tax digest, but Stephens said the tax commissioner's office is typically very conservative in their estimates of anticipated revenue. "We will try to zero in on that as close as we can in May or June," he said. DeCotis said he hopes to begin holding budget workshops with the board in early April, with formal presentation of a muchtightened spending plan in May.
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