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March 29, 2024 7:50 am
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Local Principals Forced To Cut School Budgets Again

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

Local principals have spent the last few weeks of the school year making some hard choices. In addition to all of the end-of-school activities going on, they have also had to re-open their school budgets to make some major changes. And those changes have been far from welcome!

Earlier this month, Clark County School District (CCSD) announced that it would have to close a budget deficit of more than $60 million; this for the second year in a row. And the schools’ strategic budgets, finalized only a few weeks before by principals and their School Organizational Teams (SOTs), were to bear the brunt of those cuts.

In a memo released by CCSD Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky on May 7, schools across the district were asked to cut a total of $47 million. The remaining $21 million in cuts would be shouldered by CCSD central administration.

The district said that the cuts were brought on by adverse arbitration rulings and local labor relations board decisions that had gone against it.

Principals and SOTs had latitude in where to make the cuts at their schools. But the cuts were deep and choices were limited. High schools were asked to cut $184 per student; middle schools $153 per student and elementary schools $132 per student.

Time to make the adjustments was also limited. Principals were told to submit the revised budgets back to the district by Wednesday of last week. The local principals scrambled at the end of the school year to assemble their SOTs and come up with a new plan.
“It was frustrating because we had just spent so much time pinching pennies and putting a plan in place to achieve some goals,” said MVHS principal Hal Mortensen. “Now all of that was kind of thrown up in the air and we are having to pull back on what we wanted to accomplish.”

MVHS took a $90,000 hit to its budget. Mortensen explained that was roughly equivalent to the loss of one teaching position, or two office support staff positions. Mortensen and his team opted for keeping the teacher in place and losing the support staff.
“I met with everyone and we decided that this would have the lower impact on students in the classroom,” Mortensen said.
Even so, an impact will be felt, he said.

One of the lost positions will be a Security Monitor. The function of that person is to patrol the school, checking entrances and exits, restrooms, locker rooms as well as maintaining and monitoring the school’s security camera system throughout the school day.
“It will mean that all of us, teachers included, will have to step it up to patrol these areas and keep things secure at the school,” Mortensen said.

The other lost position will be the school’s Graphic Arts Specialist. This position was in charge of the office copy room: making copies for various school uses, creating programs and fliers, binding booklets together and covering other office duties.
“Again, without that position, our remaining office staff will have to take up the slack and share that load now,” Mortensen said. “It will be a struggle to be as effective in that function as it has been.”

While these cuts were painful enough, it is equally difficult dealing with the uncertainty of what further cuts may be looming on the horizon, Mortensen said. In a meeting last week with Jason Goudie, CCSD Chief Financial Officer, principals were told that if arbitration decisions continued to go badly, the district could be in for more cuts in the fall. Given the worst case scenario, the principals were told that the district may pull back funds from the schools that are generally called “carry-over money,” Mortensen said. These are budget savings that principals have sacrificed to set aside for a planned future purpose in the school.

In the case of MVHS, Mortensen has been saving part of his budget for a remodel of the school’s culinary classroom. This would provide a full culinary workstation with commercial grade appliances and all of the necessary infrastructure.
“Of course, that would put those plans up in the air,” Mortensen said. “So there is just a lot of uncertainty out there, and not a lot of trust.”

Mack Lyon Middle School had a similar staffing dilemma. Principal Ken Paul said that he was required to cut $64,000 from his budget. This was nearly, but not quite, the value of one teacher position at the school, Paul said.

But as it happened, the Lyon librarian had just submitted her retirement paperwork and was not planning to return next year, Paul explained. This opened a door for a solution.
“After we weighed the option with the SOT, we decided not to fill that position for next year,” Paul said. “That would be less of an impact on the classroom.”

But there is still an impact. The school librarian had been in charge of reading incentive programs and planning activities like Reading Week and other programs. She also worked with struggling kids on getting up to reading at grade level.
“To go without a librarian at our school is frankly a little insane,” Paul said. “But we were weighing bad options against worse ones. That was the one we felt we could work with.”

Because the cost of the librarian position is a little more than the $65,000 he was required to cut, Paul was able to set aside some funding. He plans to put it into a technology fund for the school.
“A couple of years ago, we got a grant for Chromebooks for each of the students,” Paul said. “But the grant doesn’t buy new equipment or replace those that go out of use. So we are trying to b ild a fund to replace them as needed.”

Again the uncertainty looms on whether that “carry-over” funding will be available when Lyon students will need it most, Paul said.

Local elementary schools generally felt less of an impact in this round of cuts.
Ute Perkins Elementary in Moapa was required to cut $18,000 out of its operating budget. Mortensen, who is also acting as principal at Perkins, said that those funds would have been held to replenish that school’s Chromebooks when needed. But giving back that money will require the school to scale back on those plans and just make do.
“Maybe we will be able to do what we need to do the following year,” Mortensen said.

Grant Bowler Elementary in Logandale was in a more interesting position. Because of a 2-star ranking that the school received last year, Bowler was given five additional teaching positions. These were to be used to enact a plan to bring the school back up to a higher performance rating. The school had begun enacting such a plan over the past year.

But the cuts have forced Bowler to cut $85,000 from its budget. In elementary school, that is the value of a little more than one teaching position.

Bowler principal Shawna Jessen decided to give back two of the teaching positions in order to meet her budget cuts.
“We won’t be able to reduce class sizes as much as we had planned,” she said. “But we can re-arrange things and we will make them work. We should be okay.”

Still, Jessen worries that all of the back and forth in funding will make it more difficult to stick with a consistent plan for the school’s improvement.
“We have a plan that was going well,” she said. “Now we are down a good part of what we were allocated to enact that plan. If you do this year after year, it makes it difficult to stick with a long term strategy.”

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