Enrollment in Unified School District 253 was the big topic at the sixth and final Eggs & Issues of the year Saturday morning at Mary Herbert Learning Center, with the school board discussing the potential impact of the Tyson layoffs on enrollment and funding.
The school board, Superintendent John Heim and Susan Hernandez, assistant superintendent of finance, also discussed free/reduced lunches and the effect having so many students on that lunch plan had on the district.
Hernandez opened the forum with a presentation on the amount of money the district could lose as a result of the Tyson layoffs over the next two years. A bill currently in conference committee in the state Legislature would put a two-percent floor on the amount of funding the school district could lose in the coming school year.
In one scenario Hernandez outlined, she estimated a ten-percent drop in enrollment in the next school year, followed by five percent for each of the next several years. In that scenario, with the weighting floor in place, the district would lose $266,486, significantly less than the $689,674 it would have lost otherwise. However, in the 2009-10 school year, in which the district wouldn’t have the weighting floor, Hernandez estimated a loss of more than $2.3 million.
“The reason that I’m looking at reducing a little bit each year is that when Dr. Heim (contacted) communities that had a similar thing happen to them, they said the biggest impact happened in the first year, and then about half as many the next year, and the following year,” Hernandez said. “And usually after four, five, six years, it leveled out and maybe even began to come back up again.”
A second scenario Hernandez outlined carried a 15-percent drop in enrollment the first year and five percent in subsequent years. That scenario would produce a loss of more than $3 million in 2009-10 and more than $2 million in 2010-11.
After the question-and-answer portion of the forum started, one attendee asked if a mill levy increase would be coming if the district actually went on to lose $3 million in 2009-10. Board member Mike Crouch said no one on the board knew what the funding numbers would look like in two years.
“What will happen with the mill levy two years from now, I don’t know that anybody knows that answer,” Crouch said. “But we are examining things closely and trying to be proactive, rather than reactive, in the situation.”
Board President Grant Riles said the board would be looking at some of its initial budget reduction proposals on its agenda next week.
In Hernandez’ analysis of the district’s potential funding loss, she noted that the district has 48 or 49 percent of students in the free/reduced lunch programs. Having a number over 50 percent qualifies a district as “high-needs.” One person asked whether having such a high number of free/reduced lunch children was a benefit to the district.
Crouch said that question was “a little bit of a Catch-22. I think it’s safe to say that we would prefer that none of our families in Emporia be economically challenged and have to be on free/reduced lunches, and that those students would not have to be on that service.
“However, I think the benefit that we get, like Susan said, from the state, is the additional funding that helps us to, in turn, essentially assist those families, to help educate those students and make sure that they’re getting every opportunity that they need to succeed.”
Board member Mike Helbert added that one of the problems in budgeting is that if the district loses economically challenged children, that may cost the district state funds. He noted how much data still had yet to be collected.
“We asked Susan and the staff and Dr. Heim to run scenarios for us, and that’s what they’ve done,” he said. “But quite frankly, nobody really knows right now, and all we’re doing is trying to plan as best we can with the figures we have available. But until we know numbers and where those numbers are coming from — that is, what type of students we’re dealing with, we’re really guessing.”
Heim echoed that uncertainty with respect to funding from free/reduced lunches, saying that because many families of Tyson workers tend to be low-income, some of their children tend to have free/reduced lunches at school. He said it was impossible to predict whether those families would leave the community following the layoffs or try to stay.
In the final question of the forum, the panel was asked about the amount of hours that children are being taught by substitutes because teachers are out of the classroom being trained to meet state standards. The attendee asked if the board would look at the process of training teachers to see if a better balance needed to be reached between teachers’ time in and out of the classroom.
“I think that’s always a concern,” Riles said, “and we know that at times, (it) may seem like the regular teacher’s out of the classroom more than we would prefer it. And I think that’s something that, both from a board perspective as well as from an administrative perspective, we continue to look at and assess... I think that remains one of our higher priorities, is to try to reduce (time out of the classroom). But it’s not as easy as it looks from the outside.”
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