Belts to tighten at MSBSD

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough School District is entering a new budget season, and this year things are going to be different.

“The difference is scarcity,” Assistant Superintendent of Business and Operations Ken Forrest said.

The school district has encountered a structural deficit — it’s not bringing in as much money as it spends, which means belt-tightening across the board. The district is working within a 2010 fiscal year budget of about $244 million. For FY2011, local schools will be working with less. Just how much less hasn’t been determined.

“The class size is going to go up. We have no scenarios that we’re currently working on that will not increase class size,” Forrest said. “We’re going to make every effort to make it as minimal as possible.”

But the district’s head office is also going to have fewer hands. Custodians and maintenance workers are going to have to do more work.

As far as staff reductions go, Forrest said he thinks the district can accomplish what it needs to through attrition — not filling positions when people leave — rather than through layoffs. The district has a plan in the works to sort of nudge that attrition along through the use of an early retirement incentive. Basically, teachers and other employees nearing retirement will be given extra money if they move their retirements up.

“We don’t have the details of that yet, we’re working on that now,” Forrest said.

Part of working on that incentive has been finding money. When the state decided to accept $23.5 million in federal money to avoid teacher layoffs, Forrest said the Mat-Su Borough School Board decided to put its share — about $2.2 million — toward the retirement incentive.

“That’s a way to use that one-time money to eliminate ongoing expense,” Forrest said.

Likewise, Forrest said, the school district hopes to maybe use the extra money it will get from the state because its enrollment numbers are up to pay for the incentive. The upshot, though, is that if the incentive is successful, there won’t be any pink slips.

“We are hopeful that enough people will subscribe to those plans that we won’t have to go through with layoffs,” Forrest said.

Since the name of the game is cutting expenses, Forrest said the school district has decided to change its budgeting process. In previous years, the district used what it called program-based budgeting. User groups — say, a group representing interests in middle schools or elementary schools, or extracurricular activities — would get together and decide on a number of budget packages, which were then combined to make the overall school budget.

Each group was asked to come up with a number of packages corresponding to funding levels that were the same as last year, reduced or increased.

But, Forrest said, since for this budge cycle the district knows it will have to make cuts, that seemed like the wrong approach.

“We’re not going to ask the public to voluntarily go through with a scalpel and start cutting,” he said. “That’s not a fair thing to do.”

The groups will still meet, Forrest said, but in more of an advisory role. The district will come to them, present what it’s come up with for the budget and seek input.

He said the new process will include a lot of things like metrics, ratios and comparisons. A good example of a ratio is the teacher-pupil ratio which, Forrest reiterated, will be going up. A metric would be something like taking a look at how many square feet of hard floor a janitor can clean in a shift, then dividing the total number of square feet of district floor by that number to come up with a number for how many janitors the district needs. A comparison would mean looking at similarly sized or similarly situated school districts to see what their requirements are.

But you have to be careful with those sorts of comparisons, Forrest said.

“Each district is unique, so you must leave yourself some leeway,” Forrest said. “You can’t really compare the staffing for the facilities department in Anchorage to the staffing for the facilities department in Mat-Su because Anchorage is geographically dense. They’re not going to have the windshield time” moving between buildings.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.