School district faces $300,000 in unmet costs
As the school board passed a tentative budget Superintendent Darrell Treece announced that the district will probably pay out more and take in less funding from the state.
“This is it,” Treece said. “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on.”
The school district is looking at almost $300,000 in increased costs and cutbacks.
The state agreed to put two days back into the calendar but only one of those days will be funded by the state. The board will have to fund the other day.
As the board is dealing with the increased costs, areas such as SEEK funds and the Flex Focus funds have been cut.
SEEK funds and Flex Focus funds deal with areas such as textbooks and preschool.
“It’s survivable but not a good situation,” Treece said. “I didn’t even figure out the next year because that will be even worse.”
The future of the budget depends on the special session now underway in Frankfort.
“We can’t call a special session for our budget,” Treece said.
While the budet news was bad, the board heard a positive message from Heather Spoon, with the Energy Technology Career Academy, who spoke about the progress of the academy.
“We’re the first ever rural career academy,” Spoon said.
Students from the ETCA recently won an award for National High School Rookie of the Year and will be go to Washington in June. The board gave the academy $60 per student to help fund the trip.
The award was due to the solar panels that were put on the roof of the high school over spring break. The academy hopes to study how much the panels save the school in utilities.
“We’re the only people in the state who are collecting this data,” Spoon said.
The students will study the electricity bills from past years in comparison to this year’s bills to see how much the panels really save.
“We hope to decrease the cost,” Spoon said.
On other topics:
• Testing was held during the first week in May. Treece did walk throughs during testing to see how well the students were working.
“Everybody was working hard and taking it seriously,” Treece said. “We’re expecting some good results this year.”
• The board couldn’t get funding approved for the repair of the bus garage.
The board wanted to take the money out of the excess construction funds but were refused. The board will try to see if they can take the money out of capital outlay.
• The board will hire a school improvement coordinator to work on improvement at the Adair County Middle School.
The middle school ranked as needing improvement.
“There are 98 schools moving in that direction,” Treece said. “Our middle school is one of those.”
The board will receive a grant to help fund the salary for the position.
“(The person) can basically spend their time in the classrooms,” Treece said.
The board hopes to have a job description by June.
“It could be someone in the district or it could be someone out of the district,” Treece said. “It depends on the right person that meets that (job) description.”
• The board approved for the gifted and talented program to be offered a chance to be a part of the “Across the Channel” tour during Spring Break of 2011. The trip would be funded by participants and not by the school board.
By Allison Hollon
allison@accvonline.com
