Three of the new members on the Elgin District U46 school board were elected in April on promises to hold back taxes and spending. But just how much would budget cuts affect the district’s programming?
To find out, board members at their last meeting asked Chief Operating Officer Jeff King to give them three proposed budget “scenarios” — one showing income based on the operating tax levy going up by the amount allowed under the state tax cap, as the board voted 5-2 to do next summer; one showing what cuts would have to be made if that part of the tax was kept flat, as board members Cody Holt and Jeanette Ward want; and one showing how much it would cost to go back to the higher staffing levels and smaller classes that were in effect before the 2008 recession forced numerous employee layoffs.
The operating tax increase was tentatively approved at the board’s Nov. 16 meeting as part of a package that also would reduce the taxes levied for bond payments in an amount equal to how much the operating taxes would go up.
King said he would “like to get some direction on how the board wants us to go” soon, because 70 to 80 percent of the district’s budget goes to employee pay, and in the next couple of months district leaders need to decide how many people they need to hire and/or lay off.
CEO Tony Sanders said that significantly cutting the budget would require cutting some “marquee programs,” such as the high-school-level magnet academies.
Board member Traci O’Neal Ellis said that “we need to see how utterly painful and unacceptable these kinds of cuts would be and how destructive it would be to our school district to implement these kinds of cuts.”
Board member Veronica Noland said that “I still don’t think our staffing levels are acceptable, especially at the elementary level.” She said the number of children per teacher had to be raised during the financial emergency of 2009-10, “but do we need to stay there?”
However, board member Phil Costello said that “I’d have a real problem either raising taxes or increasing the debt.”
“We have come a long way since the 2009-2010 budget cuts,” Sanders said last week in his weekly comment to employees and the community. “We’ve ensured balanced budgets and we’ve grown our reserves to protect ourselves from financial unknowns. But this took a great toll on our system. We increased class sizes. We offered fewer opportunities for kids. We postponed capital improvements.”
“I continue to be concerned about the adequacy and equity of the state’s funding model for public schools,” Sanders added. “In U46, our communities are taxing themselves at 118 percent of the state average and we are only able to fund our students at 75 percent of their adequacy target, while the wealthiest districts are able to fund well over 150 percent of adequacy.
“The inequity is truly revealed when you consider proration,” the CEO added, referring to how the state reduces aid to school districts when state appropriations are not enough to fund General State Aid. “For U46, we are losing $398 for every student we serve. Aurora East loses $984 per student. Rockford loses $568. Waukegan loses $907. The wealthiest 20 percent of school districts lose, on average, $93 per student.
“We need an equitable funding formula that uses our precious few state dollars to drive adequacy throughout the state.”