Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Mack and Lucas answer your questions
After tonight’s school board finance committee meeting I cornered Dayton school Superintendent Percy Mack and Treasurer Stan Lucas and did your bidding — I asked them some of the questions that Get on the Bus readers have been asking here in the comments.
Here’s what they had to say:
—Administrative cuts. The teachers’ union has argued administrative cuts in the proposals were less severe than the classroom-based cuts and told its members that there is one administrator for every 16 teachers.
Lucas said roughly 15 percent of the district’s administrators are paid for by state and federal programs and do not affect the general fund budget, which is where the crisis lies. Administration, overall, makes up about 5 percent of the district’s budget, he said. This is a contentious issue. School leaders argue that many administrative jobs are required by the state and federal programs, or needed to support those programs, but shouldn’t count against the district since no local money is going toward them.
But union leaders and other critics say the district is top heavy, that it could cut from the central office to save money that could be used to restore academic cuts.
Mack said top school leaders have pared administrative jobs consistently since he took over in 2002 and that he made a conscious effort to move administrators to state and federal funding. More administrative cuts are still to come, he said.
“The administration is far smaller than it was in 2002,” he said.”When I came here, state and federal programs bought things, not people. Now they pay for people.”
Lucas said he would try to get me breakdown of administrators — how many are at the schools, how many are funded by state and federal programs and how many work at the Ludlow buildings. I’ll let you know what those numbers look like when I get them.
—Athletics. Some teachers have complained that the district is cutting back on high school courses and adjunct faculty but planning to maintain expensive sports like football even into next year. They argued that the district’s rationale that sports like football, basketball and volleyball generate revenue or are high interest is not enough to choose them over academic programs.
Dayton does not make huge revenue off its sports programs. In fact, a portion of Tuesday’s meeting was spent on the continuing concern of Welcome Stadium. By year’s end, the district plans to make Welcome an “enterprise fund,” one that is supposed to be a business enterprise and expected to pay for itself.
The district has had a hard time figuring out exactly what Welcome costs because its operations are so intermingled with the athletic department funds. This move is designed to separate it out, in part to make it easier to judge the success of the district’s new partnership with the University of Dayton to jointly manage the stadium.
Mack said basketball is probably the one sport that pays for itself through ticket sales, but that the other choices for what sports to save were driven by a desire to offer some athletic programs in the areas kids had the most interest.
“You have a lot of participation in those sports. They fill those teams completely,” he said.
—Adjunct arts faculty. Mack said observers should view the cuts globally, rather than pit one program vs. another and argue for taking one cut out to keep another program in. The cuts, he said, were designed to be spread across all areas of the operation.
In addition to cuts in adjunct faculty for arts, he said, there are also cutbacks in course offerings and larger class sizes at other top academic programs like the Dayton Early College Academy and Colonel White’s academic magnet program.
Mack said the initial discussions about adjuncts might have resulted in even deeper cuts sooner but that administrators backed off some of the early cuts.
“It’s hard to have any area that’s untouched,” he said. “We want to keep the staff in place everywhere as much as possible. We really pushed those cuts back as far as we could.”
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