Unfunded mandates weigh heavily on Gunnison RE1J school district

Schools forced to pick up the slack

Look at any of the Gunnison RE1J school district’s recent budgets (available online) and you can see that it’s expensive to run a school. Between the cost of keeping the buildings open, warm and lit, the salaries and benefits paid to teachers, equipment and everything else, the bill has grown to more than $14 million a year. At the same time, state-level budget worries have stanched the flow of cash to local coffers.

But as the costs of operation increases and the revenue stream from the state dries up, district administrators and school board members are pointing to a growing number of legislative mandates, from the state and federal governments, which are costing the district dearly in cash and time at a point when they can’t afford more of either.
“Numerous bills have been passed that affect the district,” Superintendent Jon Nelson says, adding that the district has trimmed the ranks of its administration from 13 to ten, when more is being asked of each one. Some of the laws require stricter or more time-consuming financial reporting while others are forcing the district to take an even more time-consuming count of its students. “Bottom line is [it’s] much more labor intensive,” he says.
Nelson says a good example of the types of mandates facing the district is Senate Bill 191 dealing with educator effectiveness. That law is currently in a phasing-in period, during which elements of the evaluations are being implemented in schools around the state in “pilot programs.”
When the program goes statewide in 2014, Nelson says every teacher and principal will have to be evaluated each year to meet the requirements of the law.   As it stands currently “probationary teachers” are the only teachers evaluated every year, and the rest of the teaching staff is on a 3 year rotation while the district evaluates site administrators every year and the change, because of SB 191, will mean three times the work in just one legislative change.
Board member Bill Powell, who has repeatedly expressed his frustration at the growing burden on districts to meet state mandates, pointed out that “This is the law. These mandates are non-debatable, non-negotiable requirements of the law.”
And while the laws have to be followed by the district to avoid further funding restrictions, district director of special services Marta Smith says the parts of the law that require the state to chip in a share of the implementation costs are going unheeded pretty regularly.
Special Education, which first got off the ground in the 1970s, is one of the areas of instruction the district feels strongly about maintaining, but has to dig deep into its own pockets to fund when the federal and state governments handing down the mandate aren’t paying their share. Powell says at the inception of special education mandates, the federal government promised to fund 40 percent of the programs but has never exceeded 17 percent. The rest is left to the schools.
Smith told the school board at a meeting Monday, November 28, “We get almost $154,000 as part of our consolidated grant, but then the expense of running the [special education] program well exceeds that, so we need a huge district contribution to that.” The district’s total budgeted expense for all of special education is more than $1.1 million.
Changes at the state and federal level have led to changes in the definition of special education as well, and the list of conditions requiring specific expertise from a teacher has grown to more than a dozen. And while the list continues to grow, casting a wider net in its identification of students with special needs, the government’s contribution to the success of those children is shrinking.
Next year, between 130 and 160 students district-wide will need English language services, costing the district an estimated $250,000. The state is pitching in $7,600. And while the district has been successful in using grant money to fund portions of several special population-related salaries, they still have a sizeable share to make up on their own.
The district also tries to give special attention to the 80 or so students who are excelling in their studies and are in the 95th percentile of academic aptitude. And for the 11 students in the middle who want to get a high school education before moving into the workforce, Smith says the district is shelling out a little more than $111,000 to fund the school to work alliance program and taking in just over $16,000 in revenue.
“It has many layers to it,” Smith said of the school to work alliance program. “Part of it is shadowing, part of it is research in terms of what kinds of things students might be involved in. And then when the student is actually out on the job it pays for a portion of their wages.”
Despite seeing the value in funding such vital programs as special education and the school to work alliance, the program that had the members of the board wondering was one associated with Title 1 federal funding that required the district to contract with an outside company to tutor underperforming students after school.
Title 1 is a federal program that supplies money, with strings, to schools with large numbers of low income families. The funds are to be used to provide additional reading and math support. One of those strings requires the district to supply “supplemental educational services,” or tutoring, that amount to 20 percent of the total Title 1 expenditures.
“We’d love to, but are not allowed to, provide those supplemental educational services ourselves. The federal government doesn’t allow us to do that. We have to contract with a company or a set of companies that do this tutoring,” Smith said. “Given our proximity to a metro area, it’s not that easy for us.”
She explained that the district contracts with a company for $50 an hour, which hires local schoolteachers to tutor students for $20 an hour. “It’s a stranglehold on us that’s extraordinary and we have 20 percent of our budget tied up, in a good way, to provide tutoring. But the problem is the system that runs this doesn’t work very well for us… We have to put that much money in, so it’s right at $36,000 that we spend each year.”
Board member Jim Perkins noted the money being spent on mandates and then rattled off the list of more than a dozen positions that have been lost in the last few years because of budget reductions.
“All of the duties those people used to do have been absorbed by other people,” he said. “This just goes to show that we’re getting closer and closer to bear bones instruction. We’ve abandoned a lot of the programs we once thought were important. And I still feel school should be about creating well-balanced kids.”
New board member Don Hagar asked if the district had made any complaints to its representatives about the excessive mandates. When Smith said she had made an official complaint about one, he indicated that it went right in the trash. He then asked if the board had made any attempt at cutting programs they didn’t think were performing. “I also think we need to look at what have we added and is it doing what we added it for,” he said.
But as the cuts keep coming, the district is trying to develop a list of items that have been taken from the budget in the last four years before starting talks about alternative forms of funding with the Gunnison Valley Education Foundation December 6.