State budget cuts putting big pinch on local school district finances

Everything is on the table…

Colorado’s budget crisis is putting the crunch on the local school district. The Gunnison Watershed RE1J school district is anticipating a nearly $50,000 cut in state funding for the rest of this year and a potential $1 million slash to the budget for 2010-11.

“With the state of the ’09-’10 budget, we’re expecting more cuts to public education,” District Business Manager Stephanie Juneau told the school board at a meeting on Monday, January 11.
When the legislative session starts this week in Denver, Juneau expects a proposal to hit the floor that would shave about $10 million from the public education fund and could bring the state’s budget closer to being balanced.
“We were required to set aside money in a ‘fiscal contingency reserve’ of $235,796,” Juneau said. “The state made us put that aside in case the budget projections came in as bad as they were anticipating. And they’ve come in as bad and worse.”
Gov. Bill Ritter’s proposed $260 million cut to kindergarten through twelfth grade education might guide the state toward balancing the estimated $1.5 billion deficit in next year’s $18 billion budget. But it won’t be a painless process.
The district’s administrative team will get together January 14 to discuss options for making the school’s annual $12.2 million program budget work with the impending cuts to state funding.
“Everything is on the table,” Juneau said. “They are struggling and we are going to struggle along with them.”
Juneau said that while the grant money the school district receives will likely remain fairly static, they are expecting an increased payment from the Federal Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program, adding that she thought PILT would be the district’s only supplemental funding to increase this year, which could still help close the budget gap.
And the bad news might only get worse for the district as the state tries to catch up with a growing deficit.
“Next year for the ’10-’11 budget, we could be looking at an overall reduction of 7.75 percent, which translates to $1 million loss for the district,” she said. “That amount is estimated, because it has to be voted on at the legislature. But it could be more.”
Superintendent Jon Nelson told the board that the district’s administrative team will be looking at ways of handling the funding cuts that will minimize the impact to students.
“[The administrative team] will be getting together Thursday to work on the budget. We’re going to ask everyone to bring back a list of items to put on the table and then we’ll prioritize those items that stay at the table,” Nelson said. “On the bright side, there are 177 other districts in the state that are doing it as well, so we have resources to draw on.”