Life after Death. Two schools are closed

What is the problem?

Two schools are dead and one, Arrowhead, is left alive. The SMSD can save an alleged $1.8 million for the next school year with the two schools closed, but still has about a $3 million alleged deficit that will be covered by money from the district's reserve.

Since August 2, 2000, when the list of 11 schools being evaluated for closing was announced, numerous articles on the school closings were published, but there was very little financial information. From graph "D" on chart 1 we can see that the operational budget had steady growth for all years since 1987 and even gained about 10% after 1992. This chart had never been published before. However, the 1992 school financial law allowed a local option budget (LOB), which caused the mentioned 10% increase, only for the 1992/93 school year and about a 15% drop was expected for consecutive years. It was a personal achievement of Dr. Kaplan that the SMSD and other districts experienced the LOB of 25% of the total state aid, according to Dr. Denny during a meeting at Mrs. Lusk's house. The total operating budget growth during years after 1992 was 28.8%, or a little bit above inflation, which was 22.5%.

The first problem is that the State Base Aid (SBA) is not corrected automatically in accordance with the Consumer Product Index (CPI) and each annual increase must be approved by the state legislators, which requires enormous effort from officials of all school districts. The SBA should be correlated in accordance with CPI automatically.

The total state operating budget growth since 1991 is 43.6% compared to 22.5% inflation (chart 2, graph "General Expenditures", page 2). However, these are average numbers, which means that some districts are restrained in money, as is the SMSD, while others have more money than they need.

The second problem is that the current 1992 law does not have a differentiation mechanism to distinguish districts in expensive areas from those in less expensive areas.

All districts in trouble can do a lot to avoid deficits by reorganizing operations, but it is unlikely that any are willing to do so.

Now back to the SMSD financial crisis: while the district's administration has unlimited support from almost all county officials and newspapers, their appeal to the State is more emotional rather than based on financial data and its analysis.

The state legislators' arguments are based on the financial data that they have from the KSDE, which they are open to share with anybody. Their questions are simple: how much do districts in trouble spend per student?, how much do they receive?, and how do they spend the money? Residents of Johnson County are educated people. As was published by Sun Newspapers, over 40% of residents over 25 years old have college degrees. How much the SMSD receives and spends per student also was published.

Even some state legislators elected from Johnson County are sharing their opinion that the SMSD should show how they spend money and are very reluctant to increase taxes for schools. On the other hand, school districts are very reluctant to take any internal measures to adjust their spending and its rate of increase.

While growth of the CPI, the measure of inflation, was under 3% per year from 1992 to 1999, the SMSD salary package (salaries and benefits) growth was above 4% per year for the last 5 years.

The salary package comprises 86% of the district's total operating budget. In the private sector many ways exist to provide raises up to 10% while keeping the total salary budget under control with inflation. School districts should use their experience.

On the other hand, legislators should once and for all pass a law that the SBA should be automatically increased annually in accordance with the CPI.

Screaming "TAX CUT, TAX CUT" as well as "TAX HIKE, TAX HIKE" should be eliminated as a tool to solve legislative problems, and citizens in cooperation with school administrators and legislators should solve all problems, not only the school finance crisis, provided that a crisis exists.