School survey indicates parents willing to pay

School district gets cost-saving suggestions

With school budgets being squeezed again across the state after several years of shrinking revenues, the Gunnison RE1J school district got some feedback on what the community thinks of the job the administration is doing in adjusting the budget to account for recent changes.
More than 300 people responded to a short survey related to how the district is spending its money, with a range of suggestions for ways money might be saved or spent better. Responses also suggested parents anticipate a higher cost for extracurricular activities.
“I don’t think any of the responses were unanticipated,” superintendent Jon Nelson says.

Of the 328 respondents to the survey, which was available on the district’s website in December, nearly all were parents and employees, with just 15 respondents who don’t have a student in, or work for, the school system.
About 180 students at the Crested Butte Community School were represented in the survey.
The 10 survey questions were related to areas of potential cost savings, uses of federal money and whether or not parents would be willing to pay more for meals, athletics, field trips and transportation.
A question about raising the price of food at school was the only one about higher prices that saw support from less than 50 percent of respondents, with about 46 percent saying their student would continue to buy snacks and meals at school if the price went up.
The district has been subsidizing the food service program for several years, with $20,000 going into the fund last year. So finding a balance between funding the program and pricing it out of the market is part of what the district was hoping to learn through the survey. And the survey says a change in meal prices could tip the scales.
Otherwise, the majority of parents seemed willing to chip in a little extra for some of the services and activities the district provides. Concerning whether students would continue to participate in athletics and extracurricular activities if the associated fees were “modestly increased,” nearly 60 percent of respondents said they would.
And more than 66 percent of respondents said their student would be able to participate if there were a modest fee increase for field trips.
Fee increases for transportation didn’t get the same amount of support as any of the other suggested fee increases, with 41.5 percent saying they’d be willing to pay extra, if their students needed district transportation at all.
A question related to cost savings garnered a response from just about everyone. Field trips, utilities and athletics were all areas a substantial number of people felt the district could save money on; nearly 40 percent of respondents thought the district’s administration would be a good place to look for funds.
“People obviously felt utilities, transportation, the administration and all of those that ranked high in question two [that asked people where they would look for cost savings] all deserve to get a close look, and we suspected that would be the response,” Nelson says. “Now our task is to take a look at those areas and see if we can find some cost savings.”
The final question in the survey was related to the failed Proposition 103, which would have modestly raised state sales and income taxes for five years to help fund K-12 education.
Although some 60 percent of Gunnison County voters voted against the measure last November, 222 (68 percent) of those who answered the question said they voted in favor of the tax increase, while 50 people said they voted against it.
In asking about Proposition 103, “We were trying to get a feel if people were against it because it was a statewide issue instead of a local issue, and that was part of it,” Nelson said. “But the board has said they might have to ask the community for more support to cover operations, and that was a little bit of it as well.”
Nelson said the district’s Administrative Council would analyze the results of the survey, along with the written responses to specific questions, and, where possible, provide feedback on issues that drew a lot of attention. Then the district’s administrators will use what they have learned when they start building next year’s budget in the spring.