THE
ANCE
8701 Pacific St. Omaha, NE 68114 Volume 61 Issue 7
April 7, 2017
* FEATURE Check out the drug in-depth on pages 7-20.
BROKEN BUDGET District strives to continue to fix money-related issues Westside Community Schools Budget
DER CO
NSTRU C
C
A C ON
I T U CA
TION - TION U N A D C E R N C O O N I STRU T U
A C ON
I T AU
N O I UT
RE ES E P I K E COPY EDITOR
“There’s no happy news in here,” said Dana Blakely at the board meeting about the budget on Monday, March 20. “I don’t think anyone leaves here with any sense of happiness.” Blakely is a member of the Board of Education. The district is still facing a deficit, as state funding goes down and expenses go up, so more budget cuts are being made. The focus of the March 20 meeting was to announce the new proposed cuts. Those cuts amount to about $3.4 million and range in variety from eliminating four full-time custodial positions to changing transportation routes. This year, the district said that revenues have grown by less than one percent while expenses have grown by four percent. “Out of control spending is not our problem,” said Superintendent Blane McCann. While the district may not want to make cuts, he added, “Austerity only goes so far.”
CTION
Deciding what programs to keep and what to cut is a difficult process in which many people are involved. The actual budget committee is made up of community members, parents, staff and Board of Education members. Their job is
BLANE MCCANN
SUPERINTENDENT
“Out of control spending is not our problem...austerity only goes so far.”
to go through all the expenses and decide what programs and positions are most important to the district. This year (and last), they used a process called the “onion process,” which McCann has used in previous districts he worked in. According to McCann, the process helps “get into the core of what is most important. [It asks] what are the things that make Westside what it
is?” The process assigns points to different programs, categorizing them by ranking how closely they impact the classroom. The lower its score, the more a program impacts the classroom and the less likely it is to be cut. However, the “onion process” was not the only process involved. “What we also did is put kind of a check on that process,” Robert Zagozda, the Chief Financial Officer of the district, said. “We had the committee with community members and things on it, [do] an old-fashioned ranking from top to bottom as they saw things that were eligible.” In other words, the committee also ranked everything to determine its overall importance. The committee tried to keep cuts from affecting their priorities, which were maintaining lower class sizes, keeping modular scheduling at WHS, having reading coordinators (for both remediation and primary school), educational assistance services, school social workers, school psychologists, the one-to-one learning initiative, keeping the science adoption program and the performing arts. Story continues onto page 2
Graphic by Jim Schueneman