MSBSD works to close budget gap

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough School District is hoping all 145 employees who applied for early retirement after this school year won’t back out.

Even though 67 of those vacated positions have to be replaced, the district figures the savings will go along way toward closing the district's $8.9 million structural deficit, said Ken Forrest, assistant superintendent of business and operations, during Wednesday’s school board meeting at Palmer High School.

Employees have another month to back out on the offer of early retirement, so the district has set aside about $1 million to cover any with second thoughts, Forrest said.

Normally, about 30 district employees take early retirement in any given year, but the district encouraged more to consider it this year to prevent other positions from being cut.

This has become even more critical since failing to convince the Mat-Su Borough Assembly Tuesday to give up the $1.1 million collected in property taxes to cover local schools. Only Assemblymen Noel Woods, Mark Ewing and Vern Halter voted to oblige the school district.

The majority of the assembly wanted to save the funds for future school site purchases. Board Member Ole Larson said he will work with the School Site Selection Committee next Thursday to figure out how to convince the borough that there’s plenty of money in the site fund already.

“There’s enough in the fund for the next five years,” Larson said, adding funds are already set aside for three new school sites currently on the table.

Superintendent Kenneth Burnley told the board that district administrators from other Alaska school systems were shocked to hear how little Mat-Su Schools has in its fund balance reserve when he attended a conference in Homer recently.

“When I told them we only had three-tenths of 1 percent of our fund balance, the air went out of the room,” Burnley said, adding it’s more common for school districts to have about 10 percent of budgets in their fund balances. “They said, ‘You’re kidding.’ Then they realized it was Mat-Su.”

Burnley said they are hoping to continue to work with the borough to find ways to solve the district’s financial issues in the future as the district continues to grow. District enrollment has jumped from about 13,000 students in 1999 to just under 17,000 this past year.

Forrest said part of the district’s financial struggles can be traced to an explosion in employee pension expenses in the last five years.

He announced that the district will begin holding community input sessions on the 2011-12 general fund beginning Jan. 31 at Colony High School, followed by one on Feb. 1 at Willow Elementary and another Feb. 3 at Sutton Elementary. Then the board will have a work session and a public hearing on the budget Feb. 16.

After the district finds out how many employees are actually taking the early retirement offer following the deadline to pull out on Feb. 18, district staff will then work on distributing the staff that’s left throughout the district and working to fill vacated positions as needed.

Also during Wednesday’s meeting, the board voted unanimously to adopt a policy restricting registered sex offenders who seek entrance into school buildings. The policy prohibits sex offenders from volunteering in classrooms or otherwise having access to students.

“District officials will make a good-faith effort to identify registered sex offenders residing within the district’s boundaries or who have children or wards enrolled in the district by periodically reviewing the Alaska registry of sex offenders,” the policy states. “District officials shall notify each registered sex offender identified that access to the school premises shall be prohibited unless expressly permitted by the superintendent or designee, or the individual is exercising the right to vote in public elections at a polling place located on the school premises.”

Speaking in favor of the policy was local attorney and parent Rachel Gernat, who also serves as an assistant district attorney in Palmer.

Gernat said she was shocked to discover that school volunteers had been able to roam freely around local schools in the past.

“I know from my experience as a parent and in my occupation that sex offenders do not target just one age group or gender. They have a wide range of victims,” Gernat said. “I also know that over 88 percent of those convicted of child pornography crimes have had contact with the victims but are never convicted of that. I’m very concerned they could come into our schools.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.