School Board Goals

David Wyman,
Chair

The economic circumstances in which we found ourselves in the second half of 2008 continued through 2009 and plague us still in 2010. This statement, in and of itself, speaks volumes about the significance of this economic downturn. What we have learned over these last 12 months is that the improvement in the economy will be slow in coming – over the course of years rather than months. Revenues at the Federal, State and Local levels are being constricted simultaneously, driving down funding for basic services, including K-12 education.

Even with the Federal Stimulus funding, we started this school year with a substantial reduction in staff from June 2009. Discretionary spending has been greatly curtailed, including spending on books, buses and extra-curricular activities. Capital expenditures will be reduced $43M over the next 5 years.

Yet, independent audits by the county and state verify that Chesterfield County Public Schools is one of the most efficiently run school divisions in the state when we compare cost per student and academic achievement.

The next round of cuts in the operating budget – current estimates now put the funding gap on next year at $40-$50M -  will impact the classroom more directly; increasing class sizes, reducing supports for our at risk populations, reducing the number of electives, and putting additional pressure on music, art, language, career & technical programs.  To give you a sense of the magnitude of the required actions – 500 teacher and staff reductions would yield $25M in savings. Which means that additional actions, such as across-the-board salary and/or benefit decreases, would be required alongside those reductions to get to a balanced budget. A significant reduction in resources making less money.

Despite these economic circumstances, we remain committed to the Mission and Vision of Chesterfield County Public Schools, “to insure that each student acquires that knowledge, skills and core values necessary to achieve personal success and to enrich the community”.

The strategic Goals that were developed in the Design for Excellence – academic excellence, safe and supportive learning environments, a knowledgeable and competent work force, community investment in schools, and an effective system management – remain intact.

The Key Measures of Success which hold us accountable to these goals remain in place and our own expectations for Proficient/Advanced Targets remain the same. And the Federal standards established by the No Child Left Behind legislation continue their steady climb into 2010.

We will be asking everyone in the school system to continue to operate efficiently. The School System has been working diligently to change the way we do business:

• As a Board, we have improved communications with the Board of Supervisors and the community; providing better transparency with our constituents and soliciting more input from the outside.
• As part of the recently-submitted CIP, we have focused more of our scarce resources on the maintenance of our older facilities, while making better use of existing school capacity. We will continue to look for unique but viable ways to relieve overcrowding with diminished debt capacity.
• We will continue to implement new technologies to improve the learning environment for our students and our staff.
• During this past year we updated all of our policies, which will help to create clearer guidelines and more cohesion within the school system.
• In total, the Administrators in our schools have already reduced discretionary expenditures from budgeted allotments by $50M between last year and this current year combined.
• With the management audit, with discussions recently completed to reduce the cost of operating our facilities, and with the numerous suggestions from citizens and employees – including those from the recent employee survey - we will drive for additional efficiencies in the operations of the division.

But even with these efforts at streamlining the organization, there will be significant reductions required within the classroom if the revenue projections hold. Improving or even maintaining performance with fewer resources in the classroom will be difficult at best.

When we impact the classroom, we probably won’t impact the top performing students. It is those who struggle, those who need the extra time and won’t get it; the kids who don’t speak English that well and won’t raise a hand; or the special needs child who won’t have the support in the classroom to be included in the mainstream.

I suppose I should be giving you the message that “we will give it the old college try” and “this too shall pass”. That is not the message this evening. We are headed into some unchartered waters for this County and this school system. In fact in my comments to the County Council of PTA’s last night – I noted that a $42M reduction next year on top of the $44M in cuts in the current fiscal year would have a substantial impact to the quality of education in Chesterfield County. With 10 years of substantial progress behind us in our schools in all of the Key Measures of Success, we face with this new decade the real prospect of declining performance with the significant reduction in resources.

We all need to assess the future direction of the youth in our County. As we have heard in so many of the community meetings these past two months, education and safety are the top priorities. Education is the economic engine that drives this county – it is what attracts people to live here and it will continue to guarantee our economic prosperity on into the future.

The School Board recognizes that it is unreasonable to think that local increases in funding will close the $40-50M gap altogether. We will be submitting a needs-based budget which will include substantial cuts to academic programming and personnel. However, we believe that our community recognizes the value of education and will support measures to reduce the shortfall to our schools. To be more specific:

• The School Board would support measures to keep County tax revenues at a minimum flat with the current fiscal year. Current projections show a decline in tax revenues. Some folks refer to this as a tax neutral scenario.
• In fact it would be prudent to set the maximum tax rate, which will be released on February 10th, at a higher level while there remains significant uncertainty of funding at the State level. This would also provide citizens an adequate opportunity to provide input on the subject. The recent community meetings suggest that there is broad support for maintaining the quality of our schools.
• In addition, we would expect that the percentage of funds allocated between the County and Schools would remain the same as in 2009/10. The current projections for next year as provided by the County Administrator would take funding for schools from 61.8% of the County Revenues to 58.6%.
• We would also expect that the savings accrued by the school system (some $12M) from the past two years be allocated for expenditures within the school system.  

This School Board is dedicated to working directly with our state and local officials, as well as our citizens to make sure that all understand the long term implications of the reduction in K-12 spending on the quality of life in Chesterfield County.