Tight Colfax school budget to see public hearing July 12

A regularly scheduled public hearing on the Colfax school’s tight budget will be Monday, July 12 during the district board meeting. The board session begins at 7 p.m.

The district for the third year is scaling back through nickel and diming many district funds, the result of a gradual loss in state funds through declining enrollment.

The district is looking to pass a budget that has roughly $300,000 less projected for next year.

Total expenditures charted for the 2009-2010 school year were $6,549,262. This year’s total projected expenditures are $6,268,911.

The district covered most of the $300,000 it needed to cut with the loss of four employees who chose to resign this year.

Their combined salaries totaled $198,075 plus another $30,000 in benefits.

Superintendent Michael Morgan said the loss of those jobs helped balance the budget. To fill those positions, the district will hire back some classified staff, who will earn less.

In an interview with the Gazette Tuesday, Morgan ran down a highlighted list of all district programs receiving cuts to balance the budget.

“We’ve saved staff but we’re nickel and diming the rest to get to our budget amount,” Morgan said.

For example, $20,000 less is projected for the textbook allowance. Ten thousand dollars less is projected for school athletics.

Morgan cautioned that this budget plan has tightened back on different categories around the district only in the sense of “less capacity.”

In general, a school district budget plan will include some extra wiggle room in most accounts, or “capacity” as Morgan labeled it.

What sets this year’s budget apart is that extra wiggle room is smaller now, Morgan said. So the thousands of dollars in cuts projected for different programs is closer to the exact amount the district will need.

“He [district business manager Reece Jenkin] has tightened capacity up to where we will be closer to exacts for wiggle room,” Morgan said.

The federal government provided $310,000 in stimulus funds to the district last year. That is down to $43,000 this year.

Perhaps the biggest loss to most districts around the state was the elimination of I-728 funds, a state-allotted allowance per student that focused on keeping class sizes small. The loss of this figure too has hurt the district’s revenue budget.

Morgan pointed out the district can’t continue to chip off more and more from school programs for much longer.

Any more of that and some programs will no longer have any funding, he said. If state funding and district enrollment continues to drop, the only answer in coming years will be more layoffs, he said.

Three classified staff were laid off in the district at the end of the 2008-2009 school year, the year the national recession deepened.

Jenkin that year balanced the severe loss of state funding with the federal stimulus funds available.

Jenkin, who put together this budget, was not available for comment.