DeKalb County Schools has a $73 million hole to fill in next year's budget. On Tuesday, the school board started shoveling.
One by one, the board members went down a list of 33 potential cuts. After several tries over about four hours, they theoretically balanced the budget. A majority wanted teacher furlough days, fewer teacher positions resulting in higher teacher-student ratios and a one-mill increase in the tax rate. No formal vote was taken. .
"Public education is not free," said board member Sarah Copelin-Wood, voicing opposition to cuts. On the other side were board members such as Don McChesney, who opposes more taxes. "You can't go to the poor house in a fur coat," he said.
Tax revenue continues to fall in DeKalb while costs for essentials such as employee healthcare continue to rise. . The school board adopted a tentative budget that cut away more than half of the $73 million deficit. But, the rest of that budget proposal was balanced using a $30 million tax increase, double what the board proposed Tuesday..
The board needs a balanced budget in place before the next fiscal year begins July 1.
The board is likely to find ardent advocates of any program it seeks to cut. For example, advocates of the Fernbank Science Center took up a petition to save the institution and its $4.7 million budget after it was added to the chopping block last week.
Residents such as Doug Danielson cherish the institution. An engineer, Danielson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Fernbank is a valuable asset for students, and not just those in DeKalb. Some 160,000 people visit a year, most of them students from schools in DeKalb and elsewhere in metro Atlanta.
"The earliest, deepest experience I had with science was over at Fernbank," said Danielson, who visited the center starting with an elementary school field trip in the 1960s. Later, he got his parents to take him there regularly, and he became a volunteer at the planetarium. He credits his exposure to such heavy scientific machinery to his comfort working today with equipment he's using to develop better lithium batteries.
On Tuesday, board members took the Fernbank closure off the table. In an unofficial poll, they also scrapped the idea of saving $330,000 by eliminating middle school sports and saving $5 million by outsourcing custodians. They added cuts to health and dental insurance subsidies for employees for a savings of nearly $7 million, agreed to eliminate 200 teachers' aides for another $7 million and supported cutting the school system's pre-kindergarten program expenditures of $2.7 million.
Should all of them agree to the collection of cuts and tax increases, then class sizes will rise by an average of one student per teacher, and the school calendar will be two days shorter. Board member Tom Bowen introduced the proposal to increase taxes while cutting teachers and school days. He said the one mill increase should be rolled back by 2015.
DeKalb is in an unusually deep financial hole. Finance officials say the school system is on track to end the fiscal year with a $6 million deficit. That debt would have to be paid out of the next year's budget, deepening the budget gap beyond $73 million. It also means the budget crisis won't be cushioned with reserves, like in year's past or in other metro school systems.
The crisis was revealed earlier this month, when Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson said she and her staff were caught off guard by tens of millions of dollars in expenses that were not budgeted this year.
The board is scheduled to vote on the final budget June 11. A public hearing on the budget is scheduled for 6 p.m. today at school system headquarters in Stone Mountain.
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