by Judy Frank
posted April 22, 2009
The budget shortfall that Hamilton County schools are now facing is the direct result of decisions made years ago, and there is no easy way to correct the underlying problems, Hamilton County School Superintendent Dr. Jim Scales said Tuesday evening.
During a lengthy presentation to the school board’s finance committee, Dr. Scales said it took decades for HCDE to get into the current budget morass, and finding a way out will take careful planning – and time.
Dr. Scales said administrators have come up with a proposed $302,474,945 budget for the coming year – the same amount of money HCDE anticipates in revenues. Exactly how that money will be spent, however, has yet to be determined, he said.
Some school board members at the meeting raised howls of protest.
For example, Everett Fairchild said, the budget refers to cuts being made in the central office but does not specify what those cuts are.
“How do I know what I’m approving if I don’t know what cuts you plan to make?” he demanded.
“I will not vote for a budget if I don’t know what’s in it,” Rhonda Thurman said flatly.
The central office reductions include the retirements of Area Superintendent Don Beard and Secondary School Operations Director David Cowan, who will not be replaced.
But some finance committee members, noting that their task is to develop a long range plan for getting local public schools out of the financial doldrums that have plagued them for years, said setting next year’s budget is only a small part of the problem.
“The present model isn’t working,” one member observed. “If we fix the model, then we’ll have enough money to pay our teachers . . . We need a five-year plan, not a one-year budget.”
But even if school officials want to change the way the system operates, doing so isn’t easy, Dr. Scales told committee members.
For example, he said, since small schools are far more expensive and inefficient, almost everybody agrees it makes sense financially to close and/or consolidate some of those facilities.
Figuring out how to do that, though, isn’t easy.
For example, he said, Birchwood Elementary – which has the capacity for 279 students, although just 171 are enrolled – is the most expensive school in the county to operate.
But the closest school, Snow Hill Elementary, is 20 miles away from Birchwood.
Further, Snow Hill’s student capacity is 626, and its current enrollment is 541 – so there isn’t room at Snow Hill for all of Birchwood’s 171 students.
The problems are just as complicated at other schools, he noted.
Falling Water Elementary, which has 246 students, is a high-performing school. But the building in which it is housed is 96 years old and needs major work.
There have been suggestions that Falling Water could be consolidated with Ganns Middle Valley or Soddy Elementary, Dr. Scales said.
But there isn’t room at Ganns Middle Valley for Falling Water’s students, he noted. And while Soddy Elementary does have enough room – it has the capacity to hold more than 600 students, and just 343 are enrolled – Falling Water students would have to travel through Daisy Elementary’s attendance zone to get there.
Budget committee members, acknowledging the complicated geographical and political complications presented by school closings and consolidations, said the public needs to be made aware of those realities.
“When you ask people if they favor small community schools or large consolidated schools, the answer is small community schools,” one member observed. “But if you ask them whether they favor small community schools with a 15-cent property tax increase to pay for them, or large consolidated schools without the property tax increase, the answer might change.”
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