The student news site of Clayton High School.

The Globe

The student news site of Clayton High School.

The Globe

The student news site of Clayton High School.

The Globe

School budgets hit hard

Though taxes are classically the bane of a citizen’s existence, Clayton residents will be thankful enough for them in the coming few years for one important reason: they make up the majority of Clayton schools’ budget. In the face of shrinking state educational funds, this could be a good thing.

“It’s going to be scary,” Mark Stockwell, Chief Financial Officer for Clayton Schools, said. “The governor said that they’re cutting $43 million out of the education budget this year… and it’s going to get a lot worse.”

For many Missouri schools that rely more heavily on state funding, this is particularly bad news. Fortunately, Stockwell said, only about 2.2 percent—$1.4 million last year—of Clayton’s education revenue comes from the state. The slimmed-down state income thus deals a relatively light blow to the district’s overall budget.

Even so, Stockwell said that last year, the district cut the travel budget—which funds conferences and staff development—by 10 percent and the non-salary budget by 5 percent.

“The first target most everyone goes after first is travel,” Stockwell said. “The bad part it’s that it’s not a large part of the budget, so when you cut it, it doesn’t make a big difference.”

Lindbergh
Lindbergh High School, of the Lindbergh School District, is just one of many schools resorting to significant academic changes in order to accommodate state education budget cuts.

However, other schools, including the Lindbergh and Ladue school districts, are in a worse state, which Stockwell chalks up partially to the way property taxes were handled.

When property values rise, districts are required to lower their property tax rates to keep the influx of money relatively steady. However, Lindbergh’s rates, he said, are already at the state minimum. According to the Lindbergh school district website, Lindbergh and Ladue have the lowest operating rate per hundred dollars of assessed evaluation in St. Louis County—$2.75.

“When property values went up in 2007, their tax rate didn’t change and they got a big influx of revenue,” Stockwell said. “In 2009, when this economy hit, all the values went down, so their rates stayed the same, and they lost a bunch of money. In our case, we lowered our rates in ’07, and raised them a little in ’09, so our revenues stayed steady. Ladue and Lindbergh were in different positions, and they got a lot more money in ’07, but they lost a lot in ’09. We didn’t lose anything, we just stayed even. ”

This, combined with a greater dependency on state funds, is the recipe for financial distress. Both Ladue and Lindbergh are in roughly the same position.

Lindbergh, according to its website, is cutting 60 positions in the teaching, administration, and staffing areas. Of the total cancelled positions, 29 positions “will remain unfilled next year through attrition, and 31 through release of current employees.”

According to Ed Donnelly, a communication arts teacher at Lindbergh High School, however, one of those lost jobs is due to a resignation in protest to the sweeping cutbacks that Lindbergh is making, which include the elimination of extra duty pay for teachers and many elective classes.

“To [Lindbergh’s] credit, maybe 50 percent of the teacher cuts are to address less federal and state money available, granted,” Donnelly said. “But the other half is not.”

Donnelly believes that, although Lindbergh is suffering, it is overreacting to the decrease in state funds available. He also thinks that the district is making unnecessary cuts simply in the name of being frugal, as Lindbergh does a periodic ‘pruning’ process which it uses to trim unnecessary fat from its programs.

For this instance, however, Donnelly says every department in Lindbergh High School has had to cut at one elective class and one teacher—sometimes two. However, he laments the loss of many of the specialized electives, which he believes are just as important as the standard core classes.

“It’s an example of taking advantage of the economic times—as an excuse to do what some people have been wanting to do for years,” Donnelly said. “When times were good, the district boasted about how self-sufficient they were, how they barely needed state money, because they got most of their money from taxes, and yet had the lowest tax rate. Now when there’s less state money, suddenly the sky is falling.”

Donnelly refers to this as a “kneejerk drastic panic-button reaction.” Such overcompensation, he said, could be something the district regrets in the future.

Interestingly, Lindbergh is in the process of ending its participation in the Voluntary Student Transfer program (VST), which further decreases its funds because of diminishing compensation and reimbursement that the program would have yielded.

For Clayton schools, though, the program is a significant source of income, Stockwell said.

In addition, according to stltoday.com, Lindbergh’s employees were given the choice to forgo a pay raise, or face cuts in staffing, a tough choice in Stockwell’s book.

“I’ve had people say they’d rather have fewer people who are happy and motivated than a lot of people who are angry that their salaries have been cut,” he said. “I’ve seen it done both ways. It depends on the situation and the organization, but I wouldn’t say there’s a right way.”

Stockwell, for the moment, is simply happy to be in a better position than other schools—he estimates that Clayton will fare the storm better than others, though he is on guard for the worst. He attributes a “proactive School Board”—which foresaw the coming shortfalls and made early cuts accordingly—to the district’s current fairly unaffected state.

“I’m glad it’s not us,” he said. “It hasn’t really hit us yet… [Others] are hurting, really struggling, especially poorer districts. It’s lean times.”

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The student news site of Clayton High School.
School budgets hit hard