BoE members Todd and Key worry $185 million budget has left critical questions mostly unanswered

The adoption last week of the $185 million budget by the Fayette County School Board came after a year’s worth of cuts tied to the recession. With its adoption June 29, board members trimmed more than $11 million off the previous year.

But it was the 3-to-2 vote on the budget that was notable. Board members Bob Todd and Marion Key at previous meetings have voiced opposition to some of the measures included in the newly adopted budget. Speaking in the past few days, both had their say on why they cast the opposing votes.

For Todd, the “no” decision was wrapped into several areas that had been discussed, deliberated and decided on in previous meetings spanning the past few months. Though he has voiced his opinion of these and other issues in previous meetings, these factors converged to result in a vote against the budget adoption, Todd said.

His concerns included the lack of reserve funds, the impact of budget cuts on classroom instruction, the lack of a specific number of school system employees accounted for in the budget document, the newly created teacher/leader positions and salary issues relating to board certified teachers.

“We have no mechanism in the budget to ensure that any excess money will not be spent. There is no mechanism to guarantee that that won’t happen because we do not have a reserve account,” Todd said, essentially dismissing a previous statement by Comptroller Laura Brock that the school system does have a mechanism by which excess revenues could be held.

“I can’t find it. I am maintaining that we do not have an identifiable reserve account. I hope I’m wrong,” Todd said. “I want assurance that within this budget process that any extra money will be set aside in a specific account that cannot be touched by the superintendent or the board without a public vote on the issue. That’s all I’m after.”

Todd continued, ”I just want a guarantee because we have spent ourselves into this hole and we, because of the economic situation, are in a position that if we don’t fix our financial house very soon all of our best teachers are be going to other school systems. We don’t need that to happen. And I don’t believe that there is any board member who consciously wants that to happen. But by the same token, our inability to say ‘no’ to people when it comes to money, is going to be our downfall.”

Board member Marion Key said that with a defined budget, a school board votes to adopt it and a superintendent can spend the dollars where he believes it is needed. But along with the budget, Fayette needs a true reserve account with strict controls, she said.

“We keep saying that we have a contingency amount (built into the budget), but we need a completely separate fund that can’t be dipped into without board approval,” she said. “If we collect more local taxes than we expect, they should be put in a reserve account. And we need to build up that account for a rainy day or to replace the 4.5 percent salary reduction. I’m talking about a (reserve) account that only the board controls and spends from and that the board is ultimately responsible for.”

Also linked to Todd’s budget concerns is the absence of the exact number of school system employees. While the total number of employees is listed in various documents, Todd said a problem exists with the absence of a master list that should be included in the budget document itself. The presence of such a list would provide a greater degree of transparency, he said.

“Nowhere in the budget is there a list of all the positions we are funding. Even though 85 to 90 percent of the budget is personnel, we don’t have a staffing list for all the different positions. With the actual number of positions being paid for but not being included in the budget (document), that means the number can be changed at will. The amount of money that can be spent is in the budget, but not the number of positions that would accompany that spending,” said Todd.

“What I’m asking for is not that big a deal because I’ve already got a sheet of paper with that information on it. I just want it included in the budget so it cannot be changed without board approval, whether increasing or decreasing. That way, the public knows specifically what the board is doing. In times of economic distress, it just makes sense to have within the budget every position that has been funded in order that no changes can be made without board and superintendent approval. This is a control that makes economic sense, particularly in view of the amount of money in the budget that goes to personnel,” Todd said.

The entire board in numerous conversations from more than a year ago has continuously stated that classroom instruction should be the last thing to be impacted by a shrinking budget. But the classroom has been impacted by Todd and fellow board members, he said.

“Overriding everything is the perception and the promise that we made to the citizens that we would minimize the impact upon classroom instruction. A cursory examination of the budget will show that the overwhelming percentage of the reductions are in the classroom with teachers or parapros,” said Todd. “Again, I voted to do both of those, but I can’t continue to vote for expenses that will reduce further what’s going into the classroom. That’s where I’m coming from. I can’t keep walking out there and saying one thing and then winding up voting for another situation that will cause an impact diametrically opposed to what I have publicly said.”

The board in June 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 idea behind creating the teacher/leader position was to have a teacher move to 50 percent teaching and 50 percent administrative duties in the five affected middle and elementary schools.

Board members were told recently that the measure, including the classroom teacher replacement time, could be adopted essentially without the expenditure of any new dollars. Todd at the time said it might be better to have an existing assistant principal split responsibilities between two schools.

“I had requested a hiring freeze a year ago. We never did that. However, we continued to talk about leaving the assistant principal positions as they occurred and using the remaining (assistant principals) in the schools where the needs were most critical. That would have saved us several hundred thousand dollars,” Todd said last week. “But then we came back with an alternative which was to hire additional positions (teacher/leaders) and split them half-time administrative and half-time teaching. Having served in a split-time position, in good conscience, I could not support it because either administration or instruction is going to suffer.”

Key also had concerns about the creation of the teacher/leader positions, questioning the fiscal responsibility of the move in a time of significant budget cuts and salary reductions.

“We’re moving money from one place to another but we’re not saving money,” Key said. “With the teacher/leader positions, for example, we’re not saving enough money to go to the trouble of doing it.“

Todd’s concerns also dealt with the salaries of national board-certified teachers who customarily receive a 10 percent addition to their salary for having obtained the certification.

“I supported and voted to reduce the operations budget earlier this year by approximately $11 million. Economic necessity required that we do so. Within that budget was the position that if the state didn’t fund the supplements for national board certified teachers, that we as a board would not reduce their salaries by the 4.5 percent to ease the economic impact of the loss,” Todd said of past discussions on the school board-imposed 4.5 percent pay cut for all employees and what initially looked like a larger pay cut for the school system’s 65 board-certified teachers.

“The state, however, did come back and give a flat supplement to all those teachers, which in my opinion, would have put them back in the same category as all the other teachers. However, the final budget was increased to make up the difference between the supplement and the salary. By doing this the board is creating another entitlement and a special category of teachers who are to receive a different salary than all the others. In good conscience I can’t do that in light of the economic situation we’re facing,” Todd said.

Speaking Monday, Key said her overarching concern centered on where the school system is going and how the board expects to arrive at that destination.

“We need to sit down and have a real-life plan about what we’re going to do. The (multi-year) strategic plan is more conceptual. It is not a plan about what we’re going to do and how to get there,” Key said, turning the conversation to the recent budget cuts and school system expenditures.

“We’re still heavy in central office. I don’t want us to go back to our old spending habits. We’re accustomed to having this and this and this. But there are other things we’re accustomed to having that we don’t need. I know this happens across other systems, too. We spend money on things we don’t need because the dollars have been allocated in the budget. So you spend it. But this isn’t my money,” Key said.