D158 Rejects Teacher Layoffs For Balanced Budget

The District 158 Board of Education dodged a round of teacher layoffs Thursday to balance the 2010-11 school budget opting instead for a hiring freeze and spending speedup to shift some of next year's expenses onto this year's books.

Alarmed earlier this month even before the Governor's budget came out proposing $1.3 billion in cuts to state education support,  the Board had called for $2 million more in cuts to next year's budget.
The plan CFO Mark Altmayer presented Thursday did that but involved cutting 27 teachers for most of the savings.

Altmayer said 70 percent of the district's expenses are personnel costs which haven't been touched yet. "We've cut $6.6 million out of (the other) 30 percent of the pie," said Altmayer.

In fact the district had made such aggressive spending cuts in anticipation of a miserable 2009-10 schoolyear that it ended up with a projected $1.8 million surplus.  That extra money this year was the key to an alternative scheme Superintendant John Burkey floated to avoid teacher layoffs.

To Board Member Don Drzal's question of how many teacher slots were unfilled right now, Burkey answered ten with a total salary of about $500,000.  Although some teachers might have to be moved around said Burkey, "With a modified hiring freeze we could get to that," he said. Burkey suggested pulling another $1 Million out of an Altmayer fallback plan to accellerate spending planned for next year back into what's left of this year to sop up the current budget's surplus. The other $500,000, said Burkey, could come from a patchwork of savings in Altmayer's original plan like not replacing the recently-departed Chief Operating Officer Dave Jenkins, and cutting back on playground and lunch supervision.

In practical terms it doesn't matter when this year's extra money gets spent, according to Altmayer. But if the district carried the money over to cover spending next year that budget would be in nominal deficit, he said.  However, holding teacher cutbacks to only the present empty spots will limit what the district can do if it has to cut even more, said Burkey.  The district's right to teacher layoffs runs out next month, he said.

In other action the Board scheduled a special public session before its next meeting to interview applicants for the empty spot created when President Shawn Green resigned.  Four people have put their names up for that.  They're ex-Board Member Anthony Quagliano, Paul LeFleur, Keith Williams and William Geheren.

In the pic: So many teachers and parents flocked to Thursday's D158 Board meeting extra seats had to be brought in.  Twice.