Washington schools could be looking at $8 million budget shortfall

ABINGDON, Va. – There was a new figure on the table at Monday night’s Washington County School Board meeting: $8 million.

That’s the amount – roughly 10 percent of the school system’s budget – that may have to be absorbed if state funding cuts come down as predicted, said Foney Mullins, director of academic operations for the school system.

Monday’s meeting was the first time the School Board sat down to talk seriously about what needs to be cut to make up for an anticipated $5.8 million budget shortfall.

“I don’t know what the bottom line is going to be, but I think it’s going to be worse than it is now, so there’s nothing, in my mind, that’s off the table,” said Superintendent Alan Lee.

If the state funding cuts go much deeper, Lee said, “We’re going to end up gutting the school system.”

Among the items Lee proposed for elimination from the budget Monday were buses, computers, middle school sports and 34 elementary and middle school teachers.

“It’s [the proposed plan] couched in the philosophy that we want to reduce expenditure on things and try to keep expenditure of resources that we do have going to people, because this is a people business,” said Lee. “We may have to operate without the best fleet [of buses], without the best technology, in order to keep the people.”

Where people might have to be cut, he said, administrative staff approached the issue with the philosophy of cutting positions that would not eliminate educational programs, which provide opportunity by exposing children to many different areas of study.

But more than one board member took issue with the proposal to focus teacher cuts at the elementary level, when small class sizes are believed to be most important.

“School systems all across the state are facing a financial disaster, and I think this kind of budget represents an educational type of disaster, that we’re taking the financial disaster and turning it into an educational disaster,” said School Board Member Buckey Boone. “The one thing we know about class sizes, where it makes a difference is in the early grades … and for us to attack that area with our budget cuts so overwhelmingly, to me just doesn’t make educational sense.”

He said the board should go after programs at the high school level – such as some advanced placement courses – before increasing elementary school class sizes.

But school board members Dayton Owens and Herschel Stevens said it’s possible to save the teachers and the programs.

Stevens had a simple solution: in a tough budget year, a 3 percent salary cut across the board could keep those much-needed teachers employed.

Owens, too, said small across-the-board pay cuts are the most logical money-saving step for a school system that he said spends more than $55 million a year on salaries and benefits.

He proposed a 2 percent across-the-board reduction in salaries, with the balance made up using “outside-the-box” strategies – like temporarily filling vacant school-level administrative positions with central office staff in order to avoid hiring.

When the recession hit, the school system was on the fourth year of a five-year salary improvement plan, which school system officials believe are important to retain quality teachers. Small salary reductions would roll back a portion of these recent increases.

“It seems like to me, to meet the $5 million, or if it goes to $8 million, it’s going to take a combination of bad choices,” said Boone. “What I want to be doing is trying to come up with the least bad choices that we can.”

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