County schools face tough cuts; ‘everything’s on the table,’ even layoffs

Albemarle school officials are worried that an $8 million to $10.4 million funding reduction next fiscal year could result in teacher layoffs, fewer school days or even docked pay for teachers.

“I think everything’s on the table,” School Board member Diantha McKeel said.

The school division is expecting about $6 million less next fiscal year from the financially crippled state government. To make matters worse, officials are bracing for a $2 million to $4.4 million reduction in local funding for schools.

Some school officials have mentioned the idea of reducing the number of hours students attend school, to meet only the state’s minimum requirements. But that would only cover a small portion of the budget gap, said the school division’s fiscal services director, Jackson Zimmerman. Increasing average classroom sizes by one student, on the other hand, would save an estimated $1.72 million.

Superintendent Pamela Moran said the school division would likely have to encompass multiple “approaches” to make up for the funding gap.

School Board member Ronnie Price Sr. said the school division might even have to consider decreasing teacher salaries 1 percent, for example, to make ends meet.

Nonetheless, teaching staff levels are probably going to be negatively impacted, one way or another, said School Board member Jon Stokes.

“Unfortunately, you’re going to have to turn to the biggest part of your budget, which is salaries, and reduce salaries somehow,” Stokes said. “I really think it’s going to affect the student-teacher ratio, which is a shame, because that’s a key element in delivering a good education — a low student to teacher ratio.”

“Last year was a tough budget year, but compared to this year, it was nothing, really,” Stokes said.

Stokes said at a School Board meeting earlier this month: “This year is going to be a major step backward for Albemarle County schools.”

McKeel said the school division increased efficiencies and slashed operational expenses last budget cycle, leaving the county doomed to either find a new pot of money this coming budget cycle, make school spending cuts that could damage classroom instruction or find a “creative” way to save money.

What school administrators call “fund reserves” — essentially funds in the education budget set aside for a rainy day — could help fill the $8 million to $10 million funding gap some. The school division had more than $6 million in reserves at the beginning of this fiscal year, but much of that money is being spent in the current school year, and the school division is expected to have about $2 million to dedicate to next fiscal year’s budget, according to officials.

School division leaders drafting budget requests are also wondering whether next year’s supervisors are more likely to maintain the current real-estate tax rate of 74.2 cents per $100 of assessed value or increase the rate to 77.2 cents — two options officials have keyed on. At the 77.2-cent rate, county heads project that the average homeowner would pay the same real-estate taxes next year as under this year’s rate because assessed home values are declining.

Considering that Republicans picked up two seats on the six-member Board of Supervisors in the November elections, many officials and political insiders share a sentiment that the new set of supervisors is less apt to increase the tax rate than the current board. After all, Republicans Rodney S. Thomas and Duane Snow won seats in November after campaigning for tighter spending and a “zero-based budgeting process,” in which the budget would be virtually created from scratch, with department heads being required to justify many funding requests line by line.

Snow, for example, made a “guarantee” on the campaign trail that spending could be reduced in some county departments 15 percent to 20 percent by eliminating “fat.”

But some on both the School Board and the Board of Supervisors have criticized Snow’s claim.

“I challenge anyone to find inefficiencies of up to 10 and 15 percent in the schools budget,” Stokes said. “I think that those figures are made-up figures for the campaign. ... 80 percent of the budget is teachers’ salaries.”

“I just think it’s going to be up to the supervisors to ask themselves, ‘Do we support education? Do we support public safety? Or are we trying to cater to the tea party crowd and keep the tax rate below a responsible level?’”

School Board Chairman Brian Wheeler has said that he thinks a 77.2-cent real-estate tax rate should be “the starting point” for discussing the tax rate.

Snow said he has never eliminated the possibility of supporting a higher tax rate, adding that his proposals to closely examine spending and axe waste could actually allow the county to dedicate more funds to essential education initiatives.

Snow said he’s not going to stand for teacher pay decreases or a reduction in the number of teachers the county has per student.

“Not on my watch,” Snow said. “The minute you talk about getting a lean budget, people want to say, ‘Oh, he’s going to take it out on the teachers. That would not be true for me at all.”

“I feel very, very strongly that there is a lot of fat in their budget that can be worked with, but not at the expense of our children or our teachers,” Snow said, adding that he’s going to ask that the School Board provide supervisors a budget request that’s lean but does not worsen the teacher-to-student ratio or decrease teacher pay.

Snow said that when he was asked at a GOP breakfast to sign a pledge stating he would not support a tax increase, he refused. He said that if supervisors are presented with a lean schools budget and officials can “prove that it’s lean,” he’s going to “fight for the teachers” and advocate that the county create a big enough budget that teachers won’t be laid off or their wages lowered.

Moran plans to propose a funding request to the School Board as early as Dec. 16. After weeks of scrutinizing her proposal, the School Board will then make a funding request to the Board of Supervisors, which will have the final say.

The county’s total approved budget for fiscal 2010 was $303.7 million, $30 million less than the budget approved for fiscal 2009. Of that $303.7 million, $149.1 million was allotted to the school division, $2.2 million less than the school system’s fiscal 2009 budget.

Teachers did not receive pay raises this year, and McKeel says it would take “some sort of a miracle” for teachers to get raises next school year.

“And this is not the type of budgetary year to expect miracles,” she said.

For months, school officials have braced for less funding from the state next fiscal year, but some county officials believe Albemarle is cheated by the state’s composite index formula. The amount of money the state government gives to localities is based on an ability-to-pay formula, determined by factors that include student enrollment figures, real-estate values, residents’ income and retail sales taxes.

This fiscal year, Albemarle County was required to pay the city of Charlottesville about $18 million as part of a 27-year-old revenue-sharing agreement in which the county annually pays the city a portion of its revenue in return for Charlottesville agreeing not to annex county land. Soon after the agreement was made, state law changed to protect counties from having land annexed, but some local officials say Albemarle is stuck in the deal.

The formula that determines how much state funding is given to localities doesn’t subtract the money Albemarle gives to Charlottesville, when calculating the county’s wealth, which some local school officials say shortchanges the county by as much as about $3 million annually.

Wheeler said the county has long tried to convince the General Assembly to change the formula. However, for Albemarle to get what county officials believe to be their rightful amount of state funding, a small funding reduction could be taken from localities throughout the state, which Wheeler said has been a difficult sell to state legislators who represent those localities.

State and local officials are also considering a change in the formula in which the money Charlottesville receives from the revenue-sharing agreement would be included in the calculation that determines the city’s wealth, meaning Charlot-tesville schools could get millions of dollars less and Albemarle would get the money instead.

“Front page of the paper: They don’t know what to do with the surplus,” Stokes said at a recent School Board meeting, arguing that the county financed Charlottesville’s $1.7 million budget surplus at the end of last fiscal year. “And it’s our surplus.”

However, Charlottes-ville Mayor Dave Norris recently wrote an e-mail to Wheeler stating: “I suppose it goes without saying that any attempt to cut city school funding will be met with vigorous opposition by the city.”

Norris also wrote that he’s “disappointed that we may have to gird ourselves for a battle with the county down in Richmond when there are other, more obvious revenue sources on the table that the county refuses to even consider.”

Wheeler said the School Board would likely discuss at a meeting next month whether to lobby the General Assembly for amendments to the state funding formula to benefit Albemarle. Wheeler wrote to Norris that he wants to see “firm numbers on the potential impact in funding for both localities.”

“For us, it’s about [having] a level playing field,” Wheeler said in a recent interview. “The School Board feels like it has to be responsive to our constituents, our taxpayers and the Board of Supervisors.”

Norris said the conflict could affect Albemarle’s relationship with Char-lottesville.

“It’s obviously going to be a major setback to city-county relations, if they move forward with that idea. It will mean us having to go down to the General Assembly and duke it out with the county over the next five months,” Norris said, adding that if Charlottes-ville has to absorb millions of dollars more in state funding cuts, “we’ll most likely have to lay off teachers, increase class sizes and cut programs for disadvantaged kids in the city.”