School board searches for budget answers

PALMER — Facing a budget crunch, the school board is set tonight to decide what budget they send to the borough for approval .

Nearly everyone who spoke at the final public hearing wanted the board to increase the budget to fund high school baseball teams.

Currently, the Mat-Su Borough School District doesn’t fund the baseball programs. The teams raise their own money during the year.

Betty Vehrs, a former Borough Assembly member, said she’d seen the power of sports growing up in Nome where basketball kept many kids in school.

“I’m here to ask you to fund and redirect your money to … baseball and softball,” Vehrs said. “You don’t realize the importance of having a reason to go to school.”

Dennis Lazarus pointed out that a number of students in other sports have won scholarships to play ball in college.

“To fund baseball and softball will give student athletes an opportunity to also benefit from scholarships in the future,” he said.

Jaime Mayo, baseball coach at Colony High School, said budgets for his program have ranged from $9,000 to $15,000. A huge chunk of that — $5,000 to $9,000 — goes to travel. The players raise all that money going to local businesses or hitting up friends and relatives.

“High school baseball is growing rapidly in the state of Alaska,” he said. But, “this is the only sport that I’m aware of, baseball and softball, where they have to do everything.”

Bill Kramer, coach for Houston High School, said fundraising can be difficult for baseball players.

“We get to the businesses that football has already hit, that basketball has already hit and they’re tapped,” he said.

The Wasilla High School team also showed up to the meeting just before the day’s practices. They stood in the back, a handful coming up to testify, most re-iterating what the adults had already said.

Others who came to testify asked the board to seek “enhanced funding” for the year. At this point in the process, the board puts together a number of different potential budgets — one to take into account a funding cut of 5 percent from the previous year, one with a 2 percent cut, one with funding staying steady, and then the “enhanced” package.

Mary McMann, principal of Colony Middle School, said baseball would be great but pointed out that her school is at risk of taking a big hit to its physical education department.

“Our Middle School squirrelly kids need to have PE every day,” she said. “I love baseball. But I also want kids to be active every single day during the school year.”

And that gets to the crux of what the school district is facing. Board president Jim Colver said in an interview after the meeting that as far as they can project, funding sources from the state and the borough are going to bring the district up short.

He said he hasn’t heard the dollar amount but the district is facing the possibility of losing teachers.

Board member Brian Sullivan said in an e-mail that the range is somewhere between 35 and 80. Colver said the number he’s working with is 60. He said Superintendent George Troxel has done some re-jiggering of the budget, finding places to trim to forestall some of those losses.

“It’s my goal to save all these teaching jobs,” Colver said. “That’s our boots on the ground, that’s what helps kids learn.”

He said there is some hope, though, that the federal government will come through.

“President Obama’s stimulus package has a lot of money for education,” Colver said.

Usually, he said, federal money can’t be used to supplant positions in place. But, he said, this time there might be a bit of a twist. Some of the money can go to fund security officers. Some for school nurses.

That, in turn, might free up money to be used elsewhere in the budget.

But the money isn’t showing up yet on the district’s books.

“There’s trepidation by our administration to count on the money before we see it. I’m an optimist. I think we should plug in the federal money as revenue,” he said.

Sullivan would add another potential funding source. Last year, he said, the borough put up about 87 percent of what it could possibly have given. If they ratchet that up to 100 percent, he said, the losses could be lessened.

Sullivan said he’s been somewhat frustrated by the budgeting process, what the district has been calling Program Based Budgeting. The way it works, different teams — for instance, the small schools team, the high schools team — come up with their own budgets, which are then cobbled together into the district’s overall budget. Sullivan’s problem, he said, is that the proposals coming out of the committees aren’t detailed enough. They don’t show specific dollar amounts for specific expenses. He’d prefer a standard spreadsheet listing where the money goes.

“If any member of the public said ‘What did you just pass for a budget document?’ no one would be able to tell,” Sullivan said.

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