By MARK NEWMAN Courier staff writer
February 10, 2009 10:52 am
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OTTUMWA — The dollar amounts aren’t in yet, but it doesn’t look good for Iowa schools.
Monday night, Ottumwa Superintendent Jon Sheldahl warned the school board his political sources in Des Moines aren’t very hopeful about education funding.
“We’ve kind of been on standby because we’d been told the federal stimulus package was intended to help backfill the state shortfalls in education for [the 2009-10 school year]. It now looks like that has been cut [to the point] it is not in the neighborhood of what we need.”
Business manager John Donner told the board that the initial proposal had really looked pretty good.
“The [U.S.] House bill would have just covered our [financial needs],” he said.
Sheldahl explained the House proposal would have given Ottumwa $600,000 for disabled students, $400,000 for low-income reading students and $1 million for construction.
“I learned today, that million is gone,” said Sheldahl, adding that the other money is still under negotiation in the U.S. Senate.
Of course, that’s not set in stone pointed out school board President Carol Mitchell.
“The numbers aren’t in” because Congress hasn’t voted yet, she pointed out. She said she’ll wait and see what the vote is before getting overly worried.
But she will be getting some options from the administration.
“What we’re going to do is move forward [with budget planning] as if the stimulus package is not going to happen,” Sheldahl said. “At your next study session, we’ll be coming to you with recommendations for $300,000 in budget adjustments — what some people call cuts.”
An example of “budget adjustments” that are not cuts: overcoming the across-the-board 1.5 percent cut for this year.
Also a $300,000 loss, this year’s cut can be taken care of by “moving some things around,” Sheldahl said. “[For example], purchases that were going to be made out of the general fund, we’re going to make out of the SILO (sales tax) fund, like computers at Evans. We’ll have new technology as well as the renovation.”
Donner told the board they could take $30,000 out of their gas budget because of the decrease in gas prices. And they’ll save $33,000 on Special Education because the number of students who needed those resources was smaller than expected.
Mitchell said having a little money in the bank helps ease her concerns, too.
But the cuts may only get tougher, Sheldahl said. But instead of getting 2 percent allowable growth, schools will get the 4 percent they wanted — with one drawback.
“They’re going to give us 4 percent growth spending authority. But in state aid, we’ll only get half of the four percent with the option to levee the other half [from local] property tax,” he said.
Doing that to Ottumwa taxpayers is not a good idea, Mitchell said. Sheldahl agreed. He said this board has worked to keep taxes from overburdening the community, and does not tax the maximum.
“What we bring to our board is going to have to have some changes in spending in lieu of just raising taxes,” he said. “We don’t think we can just indiscriminately raise property taxes just because the state tells us we can do that.”
Mark Newman can be reached at 683-5358 or by e-mail at mgnewman@mchsi.com.
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