Once again, the word is
“cut” when it comes to preparing a budget for next year for the
Morgan Hill School District. Deputy Superintendent Bonnie
Tognazzini, who heads the business services department, told a
gathering of Home
&
amp; School Club presidents and district principals Friday:
“We will be cutting the budget.”
Once again, the word is “cut” when it comes to preparing a budget for next year for the Morgan Hill School District.
Deputy Superintendent Bonnie Tognazzini, who heads the business services department, told a gathering of Home & School Club presidents and district principals Friday: “We will be cutting the budget.”
Emphasizing that there is no way to get around the current financial situation, she repeated the statement.
How much the district will have to cut from the 2004-05 budget will, in a large part, be determined by the state Legislature and voters on March 2 who are asked to approved Prop. 57, which authorizes the state to sell $15 billion in bonds to help balance the budget. Another proposition, Prop. 55, would allow the state to sell $12.3 billion in bonds to build and repair public schools and colleges.
The district has cut $6.1 million in order to balance costs and revenue. The current fiscal year budget is approximately $70 million.
The actual budgeting process will begin in February, Tognazzini said last week, but she has been meeting with representatives of the teachers’ union and the classified employees’ union to see where money is being spent.
“We are sitting down with the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and the teachers’ bargaining unit (Morgan Hill Federation of Teachers) and we are going over, line by line, every program in the general fund,” she said. “Then we’ll be going over the other funds.
“We’ll be giving it the most in depth look, so everyone gets to see and ask questions. As a fiscal person, I can answer questions without any bias about how important anything, any program, is. Then, I expect each group will make some kind of recommendation.”
The district is facing the opening of a second high school, Sobrato High, in August, without a clear idea of the operating costs for the school.
Principal Rich Knapp has said, “the money will follow the students,” meaning the state funds that are computed by ADA, or average daily attendance, because the ninth grade students will be moving from the middle schools to the two high schools.
Assistant Superintendent Denise Tate told trustees during a Jan. 13 board meeting that Construction and Modernization Director Al Solis is “working hard” to come up with an operating budget for Sobrato for next year.
The district has more challenges ahead for next year, including completing work at Los Paseos Elementary that was approved when trustees decided to close Encinal Elementary and move those students to Los Paseos.
Trustees also committed, after closing the oldest school in the district, Machado Elementary, at the end of the 2002-2003 school year, to reopening it, tentatively for the 2004-2005 school year.
Other challenges the district faces were outlined in an audit report, presented to trustees at the Jan. 12 meeting by John Goodell of Goodell, Porter & Fredericks.
The district has all but depleted its reserves, which the state gave permission for districts to do in light of the state budget cuts, from the required 3 percent of the general fund to 1.7 percent. The report recommends the district replace its reserves to the required level.
Also, the district does not have enough money in the deferred maintenance account to take advantage of the state’s matching fund program for deferred maintenance.
The district, like others in the state, is also felt the pinch of last year’s midyear state budget cuts. But Tognazzini is cautiously optimistic about the proposal for this year. She said that although the state budget proposal would be a better plan for schools than the educational community expected, if it passes, it still will not help the district to the extent that no cuts are necessary.
The originally quoted $216 per student, she said Friday, would actually mean only approximately $89 per student for the district, because although the $216 would be earmarked for education, not all of it would trickle down to the districts.
Approximately $650,000 could come to the district, which would possibly allow a COLA, or a cost of living adjustment, for district staff, she said, but it will depend first on the proposal winning approval in the state Legislature. How the money would be put to use in the Morgan Hill School District, she said, would be proposed by the performance-based budget committee, and final approval would come from the School Board.
