Budget Cuts Hitting Deeper in Districts Nationwide

By Christina A. Samuels

Ed Week

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there were some programs that Superintendent Robert P. Grimesey believed his district in Orange County, Va., would never have to cut.

But over the past two years, those programs have fallen by the wayside. Summer school for kindergartners through 8th graders? Gone. Instrumental-strings program? Cut. Money for replacing school buses? Eliminated, along with a weekly 30-minute program in computer technology for elementary students.

The after-school sports program in the 5,000-student district started requiring fees from students to participate. Parents and students are holding fundraisers to pay for transportation to away games.

“There’s no light at the end of the tunnel currently in Orange County,” said Mr. Grimesey, whose district is in the north-central part of the state.

“There’s a lot of resilience in the school community,” he added, including from teachers who are willing to provide extra tutoring and other services to students that they once were paid for. But state lawmakers should not believe that kind of commitment can be sustained indefinitely, he warned.

The situation in the Orange County district, which has seen its budget drop from $46 million to $41 million over the past two years, is all too familiar to school leaders around the country, as districts come face to face with the accumulated effects of a slow-recovering national economy, state budget cuts, and the disappearance of federal stimulus funds, which allowed some districts to plug budget holes for a short time.

Like Orange County school officials, district leaders elsewhere are having to cut programs once thought untouchable, expand class sizes, reduce basic transportation and school sports, and, in some cases, even shorten the school year.

Orange County, in fact, may be doing slightly better than some: The upcoming budget year is expected to see a net increase in revenue of $427,000—enough to rehire a few teacher’s aides and pay for some student-activity transportation.

Bus Service Gutted

But in the 1,600-student Bayless district in suburban St. Louis, the school board voted to eliminate all bus transportation this school year, in a move expected to save $250,000. Missouri requires districts to provide transportation to students who live more than 3 ½ miles from school, and all of the district’s students live within that radius, the district says.

In Duval County, Fla., the school board chairman touched off an uproar—and a national debate about the worth of school sports—when he said that the 123,500-student district might have to eliminate all school sports next year to plug a budget hole. The district is facing a possible $97 million shortfall, out of a total operating budget of about $1 billion for the next budget year, and has had cuts for the past four years. Cutting interscholastic sports would save about $6 million, school board Chairman W.C. Gentry told The Florida Times-Union, in Jacksonville. The board has made no final decision on the cuts.

Pamela J. Homan, the superintendent of the 21,000-student Sioux Falls, S.D., district, is bracing herself for the recommendations of 19 committees ...

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