School board looks at cuts

The future of Pennville Elementary School is cloudy beyond next year, and Pennville may not be the only facility Jay Schools could close in the years ahead because of declining enrollment.
“I don’t see us closing Pennville by the fall,” superintendent Tim Long said Monday during an hour-and-a-half school board work session focusing on long-term finances. “The reality of it is, if we close a location we save money,” he added later. But as to Pennville, “That’s not on the table today.”
Board president Mike Masters emphasized that any discussions of school closings will require broad community participation and transparency on the part of the board.
“The community will have to be very, very involved, not just the seven board members who are sitting here,” Masters said. “We need to keep everybody very, very engaged in this process. … Community engagement is the word of the day.”
Pennville resident Joe Vinson urged the board to focus on ways not to have to close schools and suggested taking a comprehensive look at the problem.
“You don’t close one (school) to buy another year,” he said. “You take a full swing at it.”
Board member Greg Wellman echoed those thoughts.
“We have to look at the whole picture,” he said. “We have to have some sort of plan.” That, he acknowledged, will be controversial. “Do we do nothing or do we go to one high school, one middle school and four elementaries (at some point in the future)? … We have to have those conversations.”
Board members agreed later in regular session to move pre-school students now at the old Garfield building in Portland to East Elementary and Judge Haynes Elementary schools.
The building, which had served as the corporation’s administrative offices, could be sold in the future.
Long walked the board through a long list of potential cost-savings, some of which — reducing travel expenses and the use of outside consultants — have already been undertaken.
“We’ve take a good hard look at positions, scheduling, and insurance,” Long said. “We’re really starting to get a good picture of what ’14 looks like and into ’15.”
One step — approved later in regular session — was to end the school corporation’s self-funded health insurance program and switch to a fully-funded medical insurance program through Anthem. Though the switch is expected to result in a 5.5 percent increase in total expense, it would end the volatility and financial uncertainty of self-funding.
“I think there’s been a real effort on everyone’s part to make this thing work,” said board member Ron Laux, who worked on the issue with Masters.
“There’s always going to be concern about the rising price of health insurance,” Masters noted.
Long told the board a number of teaching and classroom aide positions are expected to be trimmed in the year ahead through attrition as staff members retire and are not replaced.
“We’re going to try to keep the cuts as far away from the classroom as we can,” said Long.
“But there’s ramifications for everything,” noted Wellman.
A survey of teachers, support staff, administrators and board members provided some guidance on what areas might be cut and where cuts should be avoided.
For instance, those responding to the survey were strongly opposed to reducing elementary fine arts and physical education time but were strongly in favor of ending a $1 per year health insurance benefit for some administrators. The board voted in February to end the benefit in all future administrator contracts and has expressed interest in phasing out the benefit as contracts expire.
Board member Kristi Betts requested a list of the eight administrators currently receiving that benefit and a timetable of their contract expiration dates.[[In-content Ad]]