The tentative FY 2010 Fayette County School System budget of $185.5 million was approved Monday night on a 3-2 vote.

Board members Lee Wright, Janet Smola and Terri Smith voted in favor of the budget.

Opposed to the motion were Bob Todd and Marion Key.

Todd after the meeting said he had three reasons for voting against the adoption of the tentative budget.

The first reason, he said, was that the number of positions for approval in the budget was not provided.

Second was the fact that the school system is picking up former state supplements for (the National Board Certified) category of teachers.

Third, he said there is no budgeted item for a reserve. You cannot build a reserve until you budget for it, Todd said.

The general fund budget shows a decrease of approximately $11 million from last year. The school board will meet June 30 to adopt the final budget.

Property tax revenues were estimated at $90,590,742, along with $93,906,583 in state funds and $1 million in other local receipts, according to Comptroller Laura Brock.

She had previously estimated the local revenues to be a result of a 2 percent decrease in the tax digest with a 93 percent collection rate. The collection rate last year was 94 percent, she said.

The budget contains a $1.5 million contingency. Brock said additional cuts in state funding are anticipated, though there was no way to know the extent of the cuts of when they might occur.

Also at the meeting, the board on a 3-2 vote approved the job description for a teacher/leader position that, essentially, would replace some of the workload of the five vacant assistant principal positions that were purposely left unfilled earlier this year due to budget constraints.

The board in early June voted 2-3, with Smola, Todd and Key voting against the measure at that time. Smola switched her vote and joined Wright and Smith in approving the new positions.

The original idea behind creating the teacher/leader position was to have a teacher move to 50 percent teaching and 50 percent administrative duties in five schools. Those schools may or may not be the ones where the vacancies currently exist, board members said June 1.

Superintendent John DeCotis Monday said the June 1 vote to forego the new position had been met with concerns by principals over the need for the teacher/leader positions.

The estimated cost of creating the five teacher/leader positions with additional supplements for their increased responsibilities and back-filling for the decreased classroom time with a half-time teacher totaled $185,000, though Brock said earlier this month that the cost could be $99,000 if other adjustments were made.

Brock Monday night said the $99,000 could be found by not replacing other unfilled positions.

As the discussion Monday night progressed, the board prior to the vote reached an informal consensus that the high schools would keep the assistant principal positions, while the five teacher/leader positions would be utilized at smaller schools.

The move would necessitate filling the current assistant principal vacancies at Starr’s Mill and McIntosh with assistant principals from other schools. Current assistant principal openings also exist at Fayette Middle, Brooks Elementary and Tyrone Elementary.

Smola, who favored the idea of maintaining assistant principals at the high school level, voted this time with Smith and Wright in favor of creating the new teacher/leader position. Key and Todd voted in opposition.

Key prior to the vote had questioned the lack of criteria for the new position, while Todd had questioned whether it might be better to have an assistant principal split responsibilities between two schools rather than having a teacher/leader split responsibilities between administrative duties and teaching duties.