GWINNETT COUNTY’S SCHOOL BUDGET BY THE NUMBERS
- General fund budget for fiscal year starting July 1: $1.26 billion, up $29.7 million, or 2.4 percent, from 2013
- Total of all budgets: $1.76 billion, down 0.7 percent from 2013
- The district will spend $1,800 more per employee to cover its share of the health insurance premium costs of more than 6,100 "non-certified" employees, including bus drivers, custodians. This employer cost equates to $11 million.
- The district is eliminating two furlough days for employees.
- The district is adding 18 school resource officer positions, one for every school cluster.
- Enrollment is projected at 166,667, up from 164,977 for 2013.
- The district plans to spend $6.2 million to hire 85 new teachers to deal with the enrollment increase.
- The tax rate, which has stood at 20.55 mills since 2006, will rise to 21.85 mills.
Gwinnett County school board members say they held off raising taxes as long as they could, but had to draw the line after eight years, the last three with unpaid furlough days for teachers and staff.
“We were trying to be as frugal as we possibly could,” school board chair Carole Boyce said, “but you can only go so long.”
Later this month, the five school board members in the state’s largest school district are expected to give final approval to a plan to boost taxes on a $150,000 home by $75.80, to $1,231.80, by upping the total school tax rate that has stood since 2006.
The owner of a $200,000 home will pay $101.80 extra in taxes.
A large chunk of the extra money will go to wiping out unpaid furlough days for most of the district’s 20,000 employees. The district had three in the 2010-2011 school year and two in each of the last two school years.
“We cannot have furlough days,” said Louise Radloff, who has been on the school board since 1973 and represents arguably the most impoverished and diverse areas of Gwinnett, around Norcross and Duluth.
“We’re about teaching and learning, and that can’t happen if the kids aren’t in the classroom,” Radloff said.
The district’s other big new expense involves the hiring of 18 school resource officers, or police officers, one for each of the sprawling district’s school clusters. After well-publicized school violence in other parts of the country, parents made clear they wanted the board to step up the district’s efforts to keep students safe, Radloff said.
Public reaction to the district’s $1.76 billion budget, as well as the planned tax increase from 20.55 mills to 21.85 mills, has been minimal. Anonymous bloggers have done some venting about it, but fewer than five people appeared at two public hearings to ask questions or voice concerns.
“I’ve gotten one phone call,” Boyce said.
Local activist Sabrina Smith said she believes Gwinnett residents are so distrustful of the school board and County Commission that they’ve given up trying to ask questions.
“I’m not happy about the tax increase and have a lot of questions,” Smith said, “but it has taken a lawsuit for me to try to get my questions answered about their expenditures (for economic development efforts of the local chamber of commerce).”
Sis Henry, a longtime resident of Duluth and executive director of the Georgia School Boards Association, says just the opposite. She said Gwinnett school board members and Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks are respected as good stewards of taxpayers’ money and given credit by the community for maintaining high academic standards in tough economic times.
Ending the furlough days is a pinch-me kind of experience for teachers, who also haven’t seen any kind of pay raises in several years.
“I even checked my new contract amount with last year’s amount to be sure that it was really there,” said Tim Mullen, a teacher at Gwinnett’s Bay Creek Middle School and the current president of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE).
Still, Mullen said he worries some teachers “are nearing the breaking point.”
“They are tired of doing more for less, hearing the media and parents bash them, politicians micromanaging and criticizing teachers,” he said.
All districts, including Gwinnett, have been hit by the double whammy of state budget cuts and declining revenues from property taxes due to a nationwide drop in home values.
Property tax collections in Gwinnett are expected to be down $10.3 million, or 2.5 percent, for 2014, said Rick Cost, the school system’s chief financial officer. In the past 12 years, the district has not received about $735 million that it was due from the state under the Quality Basic Education funding formula, Cost said.
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