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In Oregon, school districts by law must create balanced budgets. In recent years that has meant figuring out what and where to make cuts that cause the least harm
LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
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| First year David Douglas School District Superintendent Don Grotting cut 30 full time equivalent positions to balance his district's budget. COURTESY DAVID DOUGLAS SCHOOL DISTRICT |
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| Parkrose School District Superintendent Dr. Karen Fischer Gray. MEMO PHOTO TIM CURRAN |
On May 26, Parkrose School District cut $3.2 million from their $53 million budget. They removed 9.67 full-time equivalent staff positions and $1 million in funds set aside to assist in the purchase of technical textbooks, froze the salaries of administrative staff for the second consecutive year and proposed to do the same for classified employees. District teachers refused to accept a freeze. However, this was still being negotiated at press time. Asked if the results could mean further cuts, Superintendent Karen Fischer Gray told the Memo, “Yes, it's possible.”
The next day, May 27, Governor Ted Kulongoski announced cuts in state school funding; for Parkrose those cuts came to $1.4 million. The district absorbed this by cutting ten days from the school year. Fischer Gray says that at 176 student contact days, Oregon's school year is already one of the shortest in the nation. However, she says, “We had nothing else to cut.” She adds that the district's ending fund balance is as low as it can legally be-1.5 percent. “And that's unacceptable.”
The only comfort-if there was any-was that Parkrose was not alone.
David Douglas School District Superintendent Don Grotting, replacing the retired Barbara Rommel, took over on July 1. To balance his budget he cut 30 full-time equivalent positions. “We tried to do this through attrition, not filling positions made vacant by resignations or retirement, and not affect real people currently employed,” he told the Memo. “We accomplished that goal.” In addition, a reserve of funds for the repayment of debts was reduced from four percent to 1.5 percent.
The general-fund contingency budget has been reduced from $2.4 million to $500,000, “the lowest it's been in several years.” Finally, the district made use of $1 million in federal stimulus funds. “That's great, but now it's gone,” Grotting says. “We'll face a real challenge in the next biennium.” He rejected the approach of cutting school days, calling it “a Band-Aid approach that's only a temporary fix.”
However, all is not doom and gloom. Fischer Gray notes that Shaver Elementary School, where test scores placed the school “in corrections,” was deemed to have made “adequate yearly progress.” District reading, math and English as a second language scores are up across the board. “In spite of our financial woes we're doing great things,” Fischer Gray says.
However, she adds, there is no reason for complacency. “The situation wasn't tenable even before the recession,” she says. “We keep cutting and keep making it work, so people assume things are all right. They're not all right, and the day will come when we will fail.
“School superintendents meet regularly, and we're all clear that funding for schools statewide has to change. But whether we have the leadership to go to the legislature and make it happen, I don't know.”
Grotting says, “We'll be looking for efficiencies, reductions in electives and programs; but any time you reduce staff members, you're taking away services from the kids. It's a question of deciding what you can and can't do without. For me, what counts is student achievement, that when they graduate from high school they're able to function in the real world. We're definitely still functional, but we're beginning to hit the critical point.”
Grotting's career as an educator began late in life. Born in southwest Oregon, he worked for 13 years for Georgia Pacific as a carpenter and millwright in Coquille. When the mill shut down, “I was a dislocated worker,” he said, and went back to school. He eventually served as a district superintendent in Powers and Nyssa. In the latter, he says, “Sixty-five percent of the population was Latino, and all the schools were failing” when he started.
The diversity of David Douglas's student body was one of the attractions of the job for him, along with the fact that it brought him closer to his family. “I like a challenge,” he says. “I like to turn organizations around, to continue what's good and build on it.”
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