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Anderson School District 5 freezes hiring, prepares for class shifts due to budget cut
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A hiring freeze and larger class sizes in Anderson School District 5 are two immediate consequences of a cut in state funding, District Superintendent Betty Bagley said Friday.
Bagley released a letter Friday to be sent home with District 5 elementary school students to explain the reasons for and impact of any shifting of teachers and increase in class sizes.
Some rebalancing of teachers is necessary almost every year, Bagley said, but whereas in the past the district’s budget would have allowed for hiring a new teacher if, for example, one kindergarten class consisted of 30 students and another class contained 18, now there will need to be some recombining of smaller classes.
Larger class sizes are the result, she said.
No more teachers will be hired, and vacancies will be filled on a case-by-case basis according to whether the position is essential, she said.
The South Carolina Budget and Control Board’s vote last week for a 3 percent cut of the state budget because of falling tax revenue amounts translated into a $73.3 million cut from the South Carolina Department of Education’s $2.4 billion spending plan for the current fiscal year. The money cut from the department’s budget had been destined for school districts under provisions of the state Education Finance Act that distribute money according to a wealth rating of individual districts.
Gov. Mark Sanford has requested the General Assembly return to Columbia to make targeted cuts in the budget instead of the across-the-board cuts, but no action to address the cuts has occurred.
For District 5, the cuts translate into a loss of at least $900,000.
“That’s the figure we’re operating on,” Bagley said. “But it could turn out to be more.”
Both in her letter to parents and in other comments, the superintendent lays the blame for the cuts in changes the General Assembly made in the way schools are funded when it passed Act 388.
Property taxes were the mainstay of school financing, but the 2006 law replaced property taxes with a penny sales tax to fund school operating budgets.
A result, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Jim Rex said recently, is a “sizeable funding problem” because of decreased sales tax revenue related to the state of the economy.
“That penny is not coming close to what property taxes did to fund our public schools,” Rex said.
Superintendent Bagley said the problems are not surprising to school officials.
“Superintendents tried to tell (legislators) that basing the solubility of school districts on a sales tax was a mistake,” she said.
“We want to be progressive in this district,” she said. “This is hurting our instructional program right now and our vision for the future.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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Thank you, Gov. Sanford and the lunatics that want tax cuts at the expense of our children and the future of our county.
Cwilson4 - get real. There is not pork the way you describe in our schools. GET INTO THE SCHOOLS AND LOOK. I am a Republican but this makes me ill.
i thought that was the purpose of having a state educational lottery, to help support the schools, where is all the lottery procedes going too?i guess by the time everything is deducted, there's nothing left for the schools.its a shame that its always the school budgets that gets cut,never some of the outrageous projects that is not nearly as important as childrens education.
the flash is right on with his comment. The school system is way too top heavy. Need to get rid of several superintendents, and their secretaries. With 5 districts in Anderson County, that's 5 times everything. Should only be one main district with one superintendent that all the principals answer to.
in response to theflash
theflash,
If you want to save money, do not arbitrarily reorganize the school system. Consolidation would probably result in a countywide Superintendent and several Deputy Superintendents.
If you want to save money, you look at the five(5) District budgets, side by side. And, you start by standardizing budget formats for all 5 Anderson County District. This will allow you to do a budget line item by budget line item comparison for all school district.
For example: Line 236 would be for toilet paper. If District 1 spends 75 cents a roll and District 5 spend $1.25 a roll then that warrants an explanation.
In other words, you reduce spending by looking at spending, budget line by budget line. Start by consolidating budget line items first. Then, after you have become more cost effective, look at how to best reorganize the county school system without being disruptive to the students.
JK
Here in South Carolina we average spending $11,480 per student. That’s a lot of money. In a class of 20 children, that means that we spend $229,600 for just one class. The problem is that out of the $11,480 spent, somewhere around $6,349 goes to bureaucrats, or more than half the money. Since the mid 1970’s we spend more on education, with declining results. Growth in administration has seemingly outpaced other growth in our school system. The answer is simply not spending more money, but spend what we have in a far more responsible manner.
in response to Voice_of_Reason
I agree with voice of reason that we should spend more responsibly, but schools need money. Our education system in South Carolina already isn't that great. If we take money out of the schools our kids will be the ones suffering. I am all for lower taxes, but not at the expense of our kids.
Leave it to cwilson to bring Joey Preston into the conversation.
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