10 minute read
Money Talks
Blue Valley School District releases plans for the $4 million budget deficit.
By Kara Deskin and Arshiya Pant
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Will my favorite classes be cut?” “Are there going to be changes in staffing?” “How are we in a $4 million deficit?”
These are the questions raised among BVN students after a video regarding the Blue Valley District’s deficit and its possible ramifications was posted on BVN Broadcast’s Instagram. The video, uploaded on Feb. 4, announced the $4 million deficit and discussed its possible impacts on classes at BVN.
Clearer budgetary plans were announced at the Board of Education meeting March 8. According to the presentation at the board meeting, at the high schools, the district plans to cut nonspecial education paraprofessionals and certified staff “due to attrition,” meaning teachers who resign or retire will not be replaced.
Before this announcement, teachers including choir director Jason Sickel and librarian Abby Cornelius said faculty had one staff meeting with district office personnel for a ThoughtExchange, where teachers submitted ideas for cuts and placed importance on what to keep.
“I will say that when we met with one of the assistant superintendents, they were looking over everybody’s thoughts, and teachers were pretty adamant about making sure that things that impact our students the most don’t get cut,” Sickel said. “So don’t cut teacher positions, don’t cut paraprofessionals. All the things that directly impact kids, like the adult in the room, don’t touch that.”
Sickel also said that teachers got the opportunity to evaluate district and school-level staff positions.
“So, that was kind of a cool thing to see teachers look at district office positions,” Sickel said. “Are there district office positions that don’t serve a purpose, or that maybe could be consolidated? But don’t mess with people who directly work with kids.”
At the time of the interview, Sickel continued to say he doubted the removal of anything impacting students directly.
As of March 8, the district decided to do just that.
Included in the “non-special education paras” cut is BVN’s library para. In his presentation to the school board on March 8, Deputy Superintendent Kyle Hayden said that the budget reduction process never has any easy decisions.
“You realize that they’re people that are attached to this and that you’re impacting their lives,” Hayden said in the board meeting presentation. “And we don’t take that lightly.”
Librarians Cornelius and Terri Snethen reflected on what the loss means for the library staff.
“Thirty-six states have done studies that say that if you have a better staff, a better-funded library, test scores increase, graduation rates increase and the mastery of standards increases,” Cornelius said.
She went on to predict what this could mean for the future of BVN.
“Conversely there are studies that say the opposite... what’s going to happen is test scores are going to go down, graduation rates are going to go down.”
According to Cornelius, the faculty didn’t have an adequate means of communication to properly articulate their thoughts on the budget, rendering them with little say in decisions that will directly affect them.
“We had one meeting where the entire staff was on a Zoom with a higher-level person at district office and we had a ThoughtExchange,” Cornelius said. “...but we had five minutes to vote on everything, and it was a really stressful, difficult way to express our feelings.”
Snethen added that it felt like budget reductions were affecting schoollevel faculty and district-level jobs disproportionately.
“We feel like they’re starting at the bottom instead of at the top. They’re cutting some of the lowest paid positions which are directly in contact with students, and not the people who are the farthest removed from students,” Snethen said.
The difference in prioritization of the district and school jobs applies to more than just the BV district. Research done by Education Next shows that in the past two decades, the amount of school-level jobs have gone up about 34 percent, whereas administrative positions have gone up nearly 75 percent.
At the board meeting, the district also announced that about $2.6 million in budget reductions will come directly from the district level as opposed to the school level. However, according to the budget reduction plan, district staff hasn’t been reduced at all whereas school-level staff has.
“When you combine the amount of money saved from the people they cut, it’s like, $25,000... We’ve spent more than their salaries on new books,” Cornelius said.
After Cornelius stated that the budget wouldn’t be significantly reduced with the new staff cuts, Snethen emphasized that with or without the removal of a library para, the library budget isn’t in a good place.
“Between rightsizing and zero-based budgeting, they have all these buzzwords for it, but basically it means we have no money,” Snethen said.
According to principal Tyson Ostroski, the deficit, which was previously announced and discussed at a district board meeting, is a cumulation of multiple causes throughout the course of the past few years.
“Right now we know there is a $4 million dollar deficit in the district due to the fact that we’re not growing like we used to, we’re not building new schools for which we get state money, and we don’t get as much state funding as opposed to other districts in Kansas,” Ostroski said. “I mean, there are a lot of things that schools spend their money on.”
So what exactly do the schools spend their money on?
The BV District’s 2020-2021 school year summary of total expenditures shows nine specific sections that the schools spend their money on. This information is open to the public on the BV website’s homepage and details both the categories and the amounts that have been spent. These categories include instruction, student support services, instructional support services, administration & support, operations & maintenance, transportation, food services, capital improvements, debt services and along with these, an “other” category. The top three categories that use the budget are instruction, which takes up about 80 percent of the budget, student support services, and instructional support services. According to Director of Finance Jenni Daniel, these priorities haven’t changed.
“I don’t think our financial priorities have ever changed,” Daniel said. “Our focus is always first, educating students and providing exemplary education to students with exemplary staff, and I don’t think that’s changed.”
While in this financial situation, BV schools are also currently in the process of constructing several new gyms at their high schools. The money for the new gym comes from bond funds and has raised some questions about how the district is managing new construction while in debt. According to Ostroski, the answer isn’t that simple.
“Well, the money comes from a few different places. The money for that comes from bonds. Bonds that come from the community are not tied to teacher salaries or the kind of money we’re talking about here,” Ostroski said. “There are different buckets [of the budget] so to speak. There’s a bond and there’s a state-level and they’re meant for separate things. The money for the new gym doesn’t have to do with salaries or classes, it’s meant for building things.”
Many staff members of the BV community place importance on the arts programs. One of these staff members is Alison Crane, art department chair, who said the importance of the arts has been increasingly prevalent within the past year.
“Anywhere you go, an arts community is absolutely necessary, you have to have a way to express yourself creatively… kids need a way to feel like a part of a community,” Crane said. “If we don’t have the arts, what do we have? It’s the lifeblood of any community, and the arts are super important now more than ever because of everything that’s happened in the past year. The arts are so important, and we’ve got to maintain those as much as we can.”
Crane explained that the majority of the arts budget comes from student enrollment and student fees. This suggests that as long as enrollment in the arts programs and classes stay steady, there likely won’t be any classes or resources cut.
Teachers like Crane and Sickel are sure that the removal of classes is not likely to happen, but others disagree. Media and broadcast teacher Charlie Huette, however, said he is positive that at one point, a program will be cut.
“I’ve had [people] talk to me and say ‘Hey, that video was kind of alarmist’... but the fact of the matter is something is going to get cut, and some program that someone, whoever that is, values and likes is going to disappear and for that student, it’s going to feel like a terrible situation,” Huette said.
In response to the idea that the broadcast video may have come across as alarmist, senior Grace Plunkett, the creator and editor of the video said that the subject of the budget itself is inherently alarming.
“That video got the most views that have ever been on our page, and so I think that really says something, that people are becoming aware of this and they know it’s a problem. [Cutting classes] is something that is supposed to be alarming, it’s not something you watch and brush off,” Plunkett said.
Huette added that the aim of the video was emotional appeal and awareness as opposed to a strictly informative intent.
“When they pitched the idea I knew it was going to be over-the-top in terms of its emotional appeal. But I feel like if it gets people to have the conversation, then it’s doing its job,” Huette said.
However, Ostroski re-emphasized that the cutting of art classes will most likely not be an issue and that he cannot be sure as to why the removal of art classes was the primary concern in the BVN broadcast team’s video.
“I don’t know at this juncture what they’re looking at in terms of evaluating programs,” Ostroski said. “I know there’s a lot of talks when there are budget issues, but I know that the school and the district values these elective programs that tap into students’ passions and what they’ll pursue in the future... I can’t speak to why art classes were specifically mentioned by the broadcast team.”
Plunkett explained the sources of the research for the video.
“A week before the video, some teachers were talking about budget cuts and all that, nearly almost all my teachers were… I got all the information from teachers, mainly Mr. Huette, business teachers and ELA teachers,” Plunkett said. However, there isn’t a large amount of specific, accurate information in terms of what the deficit may impact. As of Feb 12, clear budgetary plans were not yet fully formed and finalized according to Ostroski, so it was difficult to answer many of the specifics of the students’ and staff’s concerns.
“It’s hard to answer a lot of these questions right now, but we’ll have a better idea of how everything is going to look soon... but we do know the district values students and the classes that are important to them,” Ostroski said.
Similar to Ostroski, Daniel also stressed the fact that the district values the people and what they care about.
In a statement made previous to the board meeting when official budget reduction plans were announced, Daniel remained confident that Blue Valley’s main priority is staff and students.
“We are looking at everything right now, but we are always looking at things that are going to affect students and staff the least amount,” Daniel said. “We are always going to go for how we can cut things... before we affect staff and students.”
Daniel was unable to respond in time for publication when asked to comment on the official release of the new budgetary plans.
The Blue Valley School District has decided to proceed with the plans presented at the board meeting and will execute these plans during the 2021- 2022 school year, but even with more specific plans for the 2021-2022 school year, the cuts aren’t over — Hayden also said in the March 8 board meeting that the district would continue to look at budget reductions, with plans to establish committees to study high school course offerings and bell schedules, elementary school specials schedules and resource allocations for both, as well as all school start times.
