State funding shrinks for city school division

Charlottesville schools are no longer spared from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s budget cuts.

The division learned Wednesday that it is expected to get $1.88 million less in state funding by fiscal 2010 than the amount approved in this year’s budget.

“It means we start selling pencils,” quipped Ed Gillaspie, the division’s finance director.

The fiscal 2009 schools budget adopted in April showed that the division would get roughly $21.4 million in state funds this year.

The number is estimated to shrink to about $20.5 million — about $400,000 more than what the division received last year — and will decrease again in fiscal 2010, when the division is slated to receive $19.5 million.

The school division’s entire budget is $69.9 million this year.

City spokesman Ric Barrick said Wednesday that it is not yet clear how the most recent round of cuts would affect local government and the city’s projected budget deficit of $1.4 million.

To address the state’s $2.9 billion biennial budget shortfall, Kaine announced Wednesday that he would cut an additional $138.6 million in fiscal 2009 and an additional $229.6 million in fiscal 2010.

Until now, K-12 education in Virginia remained untouched. In an attempt to save more than $340 million in fiscal 2010, Kaine is proposing a state funding cap for all school division support staff.

“Support positions are very important, but there is no reason that we should not set a reasonable staffing ratio for these positions, just as we currently use for teachers and other instructional personnel,” Kaine said in a statement. “In fact, the absence of any such ratio ensures that the support costs in educational budgets will continue to grow at an escalated rate.”

The ratio would fund one support position for every 4.03 instructional positions — which Gillaspie thinks would disproportionately affect school divisions, such as Charlottesville, that have many buildings and teachers and small classroom sizes.

“We do have a higher number of instructional people and smaller schools,” Gillaspie said.

According to the division’s Web site, the city’s schools employ 815 people. Of those, 429 are teachers, and the average student-to-teacher ratio hovers between 16 and 18 students for every teacher.

Gillaspie said the silver lining is that the city schools’ efficiency review is set to be released in less than a month. The study, he said, hopefully will help the division tackle its significant shortfall in the coming months.

“The reality is any kind of sizeable adjustment you make is going to affect people,” he said, adding that about 75 percent of the division’s budget is spent on salaries and employee benefits.

“There’s no escaping that,” Gillaspie said.

To save another $27.5 million, the governor also is proposing to nix state general support for school construction grants, and use $55 million in lottery funds to cover base instructional expenses instead of directing them toward school construction.

“Our capital program in the schools is certainly supported by the lottery fund,” said Mike Mollica, Charlottesville’s capital projects coordinator.

Under the new proposal, Mollica said that the division would lose another $138,000 meant for small capital projects, which generally cost less than $50,000 each.

The projects can cover a wide range of work, such as maintenance, recarpeting and repainting. This year, he said, the schools had allocated about $465,000 — which includes lottery funds — to small capital projects.

The division has already proposed cutting its large capital improvement project funding by a third.

“Now they’ve both been smacked,” Gillaspie said.