Schools opt out or do without to balance budgets

Making tough financial choices that alter or scrap school programs is an unpleasant task that is not unique to Rapid City.

While the school board here wrestles its way towards a budget that is expected to cut millions in programs, other school districts deal with similar challenges.

The Custer School District is reducing its budget by $160,000 for next year. The high school is losing an industrial technology teacher, a half-time computer position and a fourth-grade teacher.

"We are really cutting deep into the meat now and scraping the bone," said Tim Creal, superintendent of the Custer School District. "It's not very much fun."

This is the seventh consecutive year that Creal and his school board have been forced to make hard choices.

Over the years, Custer has managed to make changes by not replacing departing staff and by shifting dollars and people from one area to another to stretch resources as far as possible.

"We suffer when we do that because where we take it from suffers," Creal said. "But we're down to nothing."

By not replacing the retiring fourth-grade teacher, Custer will save a teacher's salary, but fourth-grade class sizes will increase.

Creal laments the need to push class sizes up to between 20 and 25 students. Classes those big are not "outlandish," he said. But, "Some of our success has been based upon the ability to keep lower student-teacher ratios in the elementary."

At the other end of the Black Hills, in the Belle Fourche School District, every retirement or resignation is examined with the goal of squeezing remaining staff to cover the position, according to superintendent Bill O'Dea.

"Last year, we didn't replace a half-time English teacher at the high school," O'Dea said.

The retirements of an elementary school teacher and Title I teacher mean those positions will go unfilled.

Elementary teachers will be distributed based upon the student numbers.

The Title I teaching position is covered with federal funds, but those funds are shrinking also, O'Dea said.

Like Custer, Belle Fourche is also examining programs to look for ways to save money.

"We are discussing the agriculture and vocational programs to see if they can be restructured to save one staff position," O'Dea said.

Seven years ago, the Lead-Deadwood School District made several major program cuts to balance its budget. Elementary school band was cut but was reinstated three years ago, according to superintendent Dan Leikvold.

Within a year of cutting programs, voters approved the district's first five-year opt-out, in which voters decide whether to tax themselves beyond the state property tax cap. The district is currently in the second year of another five-year opt-out. The current opt-out costs homeowners $107 per $100,000 of valuation.

Last year, the school board reduced its capital outlay tax levy from $3 to $2 per $1,000 of property value, in part to compensate taxpayers for the opt-out increase, Leikvold said.

The opt-out has allowed the district to recharge its fund balance.

"We have been having discussions for about a year on trying to reduce or eliminate the opt-out," Leikvold said.

Leikvold's school district does not receive any state aid because of its high property valuations.

"Locally, the only thing we control is an opt-out," Leikvold said.

Reducing the opt-out might be possible because enrollment is declining while local revenue is increasing because of development in Lead and Deadwood. The school district also receives money from Deadwood gambling.

But, the district is not without its financial worries. The district stands to lose about $300,000 if Congress does not re-authorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act.

Revenue is a "moving target," Leikvold said, especially when the district is trying to raise teachers' salaries and increase its base teaching salary.

Some opt out, some won't

More than 70 school districts in the state have opted out of the state imposed property tax cap to raise more operating cash. Throughout the state, voters have approved more than $20 million in opt-outs to support their local school districts, according to the Associated School Boards of South Dakota.

But voters can be discriminating when it comes to approving an opt-out.

The Sioux Falls School District failed at its first opt-out attempt, but in 2002, the voters approved a five-year opt-out, giving the school district an extra $3.5 million each year, according to superintendent Pam Homan.

"A few years ago, we reduced that to $3.2 million and extended the opt-out," Homan said. Last year, Sioux Falls managed to extend the opt-out to 2013 and reduced its request to $2.7 million.

The initial, failed attempt to opt out tried to get voters to approve a larger levy to support what Homan described as a vision for the future of the district.

"It looked at not only what was necessary to maintain, but it included concepts for growth," she said. The opt-out would have provided an extension of the school year, pre-kindergarten for children at risk of not succeeding in school, and smaller first-grade classes.

When it failed, the school board redefined the district's needs, focusing on how much the district needed just to maintain what it had, Homan said.

"That's what was passed," she said.

If the opt-out had not passed, the district was prepared to cut $3.5 million, Homan said.

"It was programs," she said. "We just looked at how to we take out $3.5 million and try to protect the classroom as much as possible."

Teacher: Cutbacks hurt kids

Those kids in the classroom are Ellen Ballard's priority as well. Ballard, a language-arts teacher at Custer High School, has watched the school district scrimp and save for years.

"It's devastating what's happening here," Ballard said.

Students and teachers all lose something when budget cuts are made, she said. Increasing class sizes place bigger burdens on students and ensure that some students will "fall through the cracks."

"The whole funding system needs to be revised at the state level," Ballard said. "Change has occurred in everything except that system."

Last year, the Custer School District tried to persuade voters to approve a $150,000 three-year opt-out, but it failed "big time," Creal said.

If South Dakota continues to fund education as it currently stands, those school districts than can opt out could soon be the only districts in the state that can afford to raise salaries and offer adequate programming, Brian Aust, communications director for Associated School Boards of South Dakota, said.

"Sooner or later, if districts are forced to turn to opt-outs, you're going to run into an equity issue statewide," Aust said. "You'll have communities that can do it and communities that won't pass it, no matter what."

Contact Andrea Cook at 394-8423 or andrea.cook@rapidcityjournal.com.