School funding proposal has local district worried

It's been four long months since Bigfork School Superintendent Russ Kinzer started working on the budget for the 2009-2010 school year, but decisions in Helena threaten to demand a rewrite.

"The budget was based on the Governor's proposed 3 percent increase," Kinzer said. "The state Senate has reduced that to 1 percent."

Though the House passed the budget bill with the 3 percent increase intact, the Senate Finance and Claims Committee voted for the decrease. There is, however, a proposal that would back fill the $32 million cut out with money from the federal stimulus package.

But, according to Kinzer, that might not be quite the same.

"The stimulus money, from everything we've seen so far, has provisions attached to it that controls how it can be spent," he said. "We don't know at this point if those provisions will remain or if we're going to be able to use back fill stimulus money as we can general funds."

Kinzer's other concern — and one that was echoed in an e-mail to school administrators across the state from the Montana Office of Public Instruction — is that in two years when the Legislature goes to look at school budgets again, they will be working from a 1 percent increase and not factoring in the stimulus money.

"So the state drops 2 percent this year, are they going to increase by 4, 5 or 6 percent in subsequent years (to make up the difference)?" Kinzer asked. "That's not likely to happen."

In the OPI e-mail State Superintendent of Schools Denise Juneau said, "Reducing the increase to 1 percent provides a slimmer base budget in the next session and does not obligate the legislature to a higher appropriation."

The change is an unwelcome one in Bigfork, where Kinzer said the elementary school budget was already in the red.

"We've been trying to preserve jobs and services with a lot of creative staffing changes," Kinzer said.

Kinzer said the district has tried to maximize usage of teachers with multiple teaching endorsements, for instance an English teacher who is also endorsed to teach social studies might teach in both subjects to help fill a gap.

Even if the stimulus money fills in the gap for this year's budget, Kinzer said he is concerned about what that means for the future of the district and public education around the state.

"Just like with personal budgets, you reach a point where something has to give," he said. "It's just going to be a year by year situation, which is going to be difficult."

Early in the week, the Montana School Board Association was proposing an amendment to mandate that stimulus money factored in to the school budget this time around be factored in to determine a base budget for the next biennium.

"This amendment would ensure that when the Governor prepares a budget for the 2013 Legislature, the increases in the formula supported by one time only money in this biennium would be intact and used as a present law base," Lance L. Melton, the executive director of the association, wrote in an e-mail to districts across the state. "Without this amendment, we could conceivably start the next biennium 4 percent in the hole."