School board to consider major spending cuts, staffing reductions

Board's budget and finance chair plans to make motion for budget cuts next week

Email | Print By Amy Griffith Graydon

12-03-2008 7:45 PM — Steve Glover, chair of the Board of Education’s budget and finance committee, intends to make a motion next week that school district administrators plan for a 3 percent cut in expenditures — a change of such magnitude, he believes, that could not be accomplished without staff reductions.

“We are looking at a very real $11 million shortfall,” Glover said.

Glover is one of nine board members, and the decision would need to be made through a majority vote. It’s unknown, Glover said, how many positions could be affected.

The trouble for the district is that, as the economy struggles, sales tax revenues are coming in below projections. Officials project an $11 million revenue shortage for the entire school year. That’s a drop in the bucket of the district’s total $627 million operating budget, and sales tax revenues are not the only sources of income for MNPS. But the trouble may continue to grow, as the economy shows few signs of turning a corner soon.

Chris Henson, interim director of schools for MNPS, said Wednesday that he believes layoffs should be considered “the choice of last resort.”

At a Wednesday meeting of the board’s budget and finance committee, Glover said he believes one option is to go to the bargaining table with labor unions and negotiate salary decreases for all employees, so that “everyone can keep their jobs.”

Leaders of two labor unions with district employees say they’re not interested, citing among other things the surplus reserve funds available to the district.

“I think it would be a hard sell with so much money in the reserve funds,” said Teresa West, chief steward of the MNPS chapter of the Service Employees International Union. “[The employees we represent] didn’t get raises last year.”

Stephen Henry, of teachers’ union the Metro Nashville Education Association, said that reserve funds are for circumstances such as these. And this is a school year, Henry said, in which teachers have already increased their workloads with no increase in salaries.

“To even put this on the table is totally inappropriate,” Henry said.

Glover plans to make the motion at the Board’s 5 p.m. meeting Tuesday at the district central office, 2601 Bransford Ave.

According to Glover, making up for the projected $11 million shortfall entirely with reserve dollars would just mean that more cuts would be needed for next year’s budget – about $18 million worth, he said, which would affect more positions than the cuts currently being discussed.

About $19 million in funding for the current school year was pulled from the district’s reserve funds, representing a use of non-recurring funds for expenses that need to be paid each year.

Currently, MNPS has $52 million in undesignated reserve funds. Metro’s Finance Department has a policy specifying that a reserve balance of 5 percent of total a total fund should be maintained in reserves. MNPS’s reserve balance is still well above those requirements – 5 percent of the district’s operating budget would represent about $30 million, and 3 percent about $18 million.