School system scales back budget, but teacher numbers actually increasing

PALMER — Mat-Su borough budget deliberations this week created an apparent paradox in school financing.

On one hand, the school system is receiving more money this year than last. On the other hand, it’s cutting the equivalent of 30.5 positions from its original budget.

The cuts mostly won’t come from reductions among existing staff, though some existing positions will be reduced. For example, curriculum coaches (an educational professional that helps teachers implement broad changes in curriculum into lesson plans) at the elementary school level will go from full to part-time.

Most of the cuts come from the projected number of teachers that will be hired from the following year. With the additional funds, even given the increased cost of insurance, borough school systems will still hire more teachers next year, said assistant superintendant for business services Luke Fulp.

“When looking at the budget system-wide, we’re looking at 20 positions to accommodate our growth,” he said.

Enrollment projections created by the school system estimate 353 additional students will enroll in Mat-Su Borough schools next year, Fulp said. That’s added to the unexpectedly high enrollment — 708 students, or about double the projection for this year — that enrolled in borough schools for the 2015-16 school year, and managers still have some hiring to do to address last year’s increase Fulp said.

Part of the issue comes from the fact that borough schools — like all school systems — are required to submit projected enrollment figures for the following school year in November, meaning they have to make an educated guess based on local population increases or decreases over the next 11 months (enrollment is counted in October). That, in turn, determines how much funding the district will receive from the state through the base student allocation formula.

The budget for that school year is then due by April 1, meaning school systems have to construct spending estimates based on figures they’ve previously committed, sometimes without a clear idea what the borough or state contribution will be.

That means that for every fixed amount of students expected to enroll in borough schools, school budget officials have to increase that by a number of teachers, Fulp said.

“As we estimate what will be the enrollment at each school, we have to staff according to the ratios,” he said.

Keeping the ratios intact allows the district to make minor incremental changes to address population shifts, rather than having to make big shifts each year.

If the ratio gets too high, teachers spend more time trying to get kids to focus and stay on task then they do on instruction, said Monica Goyette, the school system’s executive director of instruction.

“When you move over a threshold of 30 (students per teacher), teachers spend an increased amount of time on classroom management over instruction,” she said.

Based on those figures, the school system had originally hoped to add 53 positions, partially to keep up with the boom, Fulp said. Some of that number comes from positions involved with the opening of a brand new elementary school — Dena’ina Elementary is set to open along Knik Knack Mud Shack Road this fall — where some new hires can’t be avoided, Fulp said.

Then the school system received word in April — after they had submitted the draft budget — that insurance costs for the borough would increase 25 percent. Half — or about $4 million of that increase — went directly into the school system’s budget (the other half will be distributed among plan enrollees). School officials had only budgeted for about a $1 million increase.

To address that increase, school officials will work to avoid some new hires, Fulp said. The primary impact of the cuts will be at the secondary level, where the school system will allow the high-school student-to-teacher ratio to rise to 30, while leaving elementary levels relatively unchanged, Goyette said.

The focus on ratios also means the district can respond flexibly to the event of a flattening out or decrease in enrollment, which district projections show is likely to decrease to 51 students by the 2019-20 school year.

In the mean time, more students means more teachers, which likely means more increases in the future, Fulp said.

“If we see evidence of declining enrollment, then our preliminary budget will also mirror that,” he said.

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.