Mat-Su school district gets failing budget grade

Frontiersman editorial board

This year for Christmas nearly 50 classified employees of the Mat-Su School District received their walking papers. The district recently discovered it was more than $3 million in the red, and these layoffs are the first step in their efforts to remedy the situation. As is often the case when budgets go sour, the mistakes were apparently made at the top, but the cuts will begin from the bottom. The budget was not miscalculated by maintenance mechanics, AV technicians, special education clerks, and the like, but those are the people who face unemployment as the holiday season, and the long winter to follow, loom.

This is not a spilled milk situation. This is a situation that requires some questions and some outcry. Running any large organization is not an exact science, and budgeting processes are imperfect -- but it can't be $3 million imperfect. The district cites at least three different problems that contributed to the deficit. They reported more students than are actually enrolled in the district, so they were counting on more state funding. They instituted a new home-schooling option at the correspondence school that didn't work as planned and the recently signed contracts with the teachers' union and classified employees union were more expensive than originally thought. None of these things should have been a surprise.

The enrollment numbers do tend to change in the early days of the first semester. Some students who were initially enrolled have moved to other districts, and some new students come in. It happens in every district every year. It's also a closed system, and it should be fairly easy to track. It's not unreasonable to expect that our district should have an accurate account of how many students are enrolled in the Valley. In the age of computers, that should be one of the easiest things the administration does.

At some point, the district realized that the correspondence school program was not working as planned, and that it was becoming expensive. A new home-school option had been implemented, and it was intended for new students. Many incumbent students took advantage of the program, and it became cost-prohibitive. The problem should have been fixed before it became a crisis. Now all new enrollments have been closed, and people will lose their jobs. The district has to respond, it's just too bad the response came so late.

Lastly, the district claims the two labor contracts it recently signed with teachers and classified employees were more damaging than they'd anticipated. The operative word here is 'contracts.' Signed on the dotted line. How must the CEA employees feel now that they've got a shiny new contract and 50 fewer people to benefit from it? The district should have seen the effects of those contracts before they signed on. Now, instead of punishing the people who roll their sleeves up and work with students every day, the administration could do much for its credibility if it began to trim from the top where the responsibility rests.