Jan. 22 Meeting Agenda; Spending Cuts
Last Wednesday, we held a special session to discuss where to make cuts in the budget. The staff recommendations are included in a power point presentation, specifically on slides 15 and 16.
There is an audio recording of the meeting available for public review, and I encourage you to listen. The numbers we discussed in terms of costs, deficit and spending are before bargaining, meaning we will have to further cut by the same proportion we increase pay and benefits during the bargaining process. My comments:
What is the District’s core mission? We should focus our spending there.
Education
Hard, tangible safety measures
Deprioritze soft spending, items outside mission, contractors
We have a lot of different classroom tech contracts. Consolidate those.
Around 35:00 I said:
I’d like to ramp up our goal for reduction of contracted services to $1 million and reduce the number of proposed teacher layoffs. Cut the teacher layoff number in half.
Every single unnecessary tech contract should be terminated before we cut a teacher.
I prefer to keep teachers and cut contracted services like Brainpop, Sage, and other non-mission critical items.
Around 1:22:00 we discussed Kids Corner:
I asked for a projection of cost increases with bargaining (Kids Corner employees voted to unionize).
I asked for a comparison of costs with a private contractor.
We discussed potentially having PEF take over.
We discussed charging indirect costs to former enterprise programs.
We discussed closing the print shop and comparison of costs versus having to outsource district printing needs.
Toward end of discussion of slide 18 I proposed that as a cost cutting measure we ensure that the district is reimbursed for every dollar of union release time (this is the time that district employees spend on union business).
Please submit your comments to the Board via email if you can. We need wide community input regarding decisions to cut costs.
January 22, 2025 Meeting Agenda
Our public meeting begins at 5:30 pm on Wednesday. Review the agenda here. Up for discussion/action are the following items:
Please submit your feedback to the Board. As always, this is one lady’s opinion. I don’t speak for the board and no one else speaks for me.
