Sioux Falls School Officials Prepare Parents For Cuts (SD)
January 18, 2011
South Dakota lawmakers are rolling up their sleeves and getting ready to go back to work as they prepare for Governor Dennis Daugaard to give his budget address this week.
Governor Mike Rounds gave legislators a budget to work with before he left office, but now that Daugaard has been sworn in he’s expected to make changes.
Rounds proposed a five percent cut to education, Medicaid providers and other state programs. But when Daugaard delivers his budget address Wednesday, lawmakers think the cuts could be much deeper.
"We’re probably going to be looking at real people, real jobs. We’re going to be looking at real programs going away potentially," Republican Senator Deb Peters of Hartford said.
Governor Daugaard has already said he’ll take a 15 percent pay cut and members of his cabinet will take a ten percent pay cut.
The Associated School Boards of South Dakota is trying to prepare local school districts for the budget changes. They sent out a memo earlier this month saying the cuts could be as high as ten percent.
Either way the Sioux Falls School District could lose millions of dollars. A five percent cut like Governor Mike Rounds proposed would be $5 million. A 10 percent decrease would take $10 million away from the district.
Those numbers are why the Sioux Falls School District is holding small meetings with parents to talk about the deep impact cuts to state education funding could have at the local level.
"Five million, 10 million, even zero is very difficult to maintain what we have today," Sioux Falls Superintendent Pam Homan said.
Monday night school officials met with a few parents from Robert Frost Elementary School to tell them about the implications of a decrease in funding. Administrators say its too early to pick out any specific areas of the budget that would be hit, but they told the parents that even if they cut the extracurricular activities in the district it wouldn’t equal the ten percent cut that is being talked about.
"If you cut all the athletics it wouldn’t even come near meeting that $10 million. So, we’re just giving that as an example," Sioux Falls School District Business Manager Todd Vik said.
Sioux Falls school officials are also telling parents they don’t have the reserves to cover their cuts like some lawmakers think.
"Our efforts are to help people understand that we don’t have a pot of money if you will, undesignated, to carry us through the day," Homan said.
The state won’t allow districts to have more than 25 percent of their budget in reserves. Sioux Falls has 18 percent in reserves and some of that money is budgeted for use down the road.
"Those are already slotted for other purposes to get through the next five years. Just like the state has a billion dollars in their cash-flow fund. They have 700 or some million dollars in trust funds. They have uses for those. We have designated uses for what they call our fund balance," Vik said.
The bottom line is Sioux Falls officials say if any cuts to state funding go through it’s going to mean tough cuts back home.
By law schools are supposed to get a 1.3 percent increase in funding this year. In Sioux Falls officials say anything less than that will be a huge hit.