When a school district the size of Leon County’s cuts $7.8 million from its budget, the ripple effects will inevitably be felt by students and staff.
The cut doesn’t seem so bad when you consider the total annual budget for Leon County Schools (LCS) is around $647 million. But it will impact staffing, general district spending, plus money for arts and athletics.
The school board recently approved the cut for the next academic year on the assumption that the Florida Legislature will not increase per student spending in the state budget that takes effect July 1.
At the same time, costs are rising with inflation and district enrollment is down.
The school district budget cut is the topic of today’s Speaking Of.
“This was not an easy decision for any of us,” Superintendent Rocky Hanna said at the March 24 school board meeting.
If state lawmakers decide to boost school funding, Hanna noted that at least some of these cuts could potentially be reversed.
“We can go back and add some of these things back to the staffing plan or back to dollars that we push down to our schools for arts and athletics and for these community field trips that our kids so enjoy and appreciate,” Hanna said.
A big issue for districts statewide is the school voucher scholarship program. The Republican-controlled legislature for years has been a big proponent of school choice and has expanded the voucher program so that the money follows the student.
Any student can get around $8000 to attend a private school or even use it for homeschooling. That has resulted in flat or lower enrollment in many districts instead of the expected gradual increase as the population grows.
Every time a student disenrolls from LCS, that’s a drop in per student spending available to the district.
This enrollment issue has the attention of board member Alva Smith. She spent months having staff do research and pull the numbers. She’s seen enough to say the board should strongly consider school closures or consolidation.
When the school board met the day prior to their last meeting to review the agenda, Smith said she is disappointed in the direction they’re going.
“The things we’re talking about are Band-Aids when what we need is surgery,” Smith said. “We are declining enrollment in this district. We’ve lost over a thousand students just in the last five years. And almost half of those came from last fall to this fall. The scholarship dollars (vouchers) keep increasing. We have over 5,000 empty student stations in this district.”
The district currently serves approximately 32,000 students.
“Why does consolidation make sense to me and doesn’t make sense to anybody else? I can’t figure it out,” Smith said. “In my mind, we could save a lot of what we’re losing here…To think that we’re pulling arts and athletics funding from everyone in the district when we could keep all of that if we would just eliminate some of the number of buildings that we’re operating breaks my heart. I’m so frustrated.”
School board member Roseanne Wood has worked for LCS in some capacity for more than four decades. She was a founding teacher at SAIL High School and a long-time principal there. She’s been a school board member for eight years and seems to understand both sides of this issue well.
“It’s easy to say in the abstract, but if you start naming a school and you start affecting people’s individual lives and their loyalty to their school and their convenience and all those things, that’s just such a serious conversation,” Wood said.
“I went through as a principal when the school district closed Belle Vue (Middle School in 2010), and that was hard. And then Caroline Brevard (elementary) was closed, and I remember the hundreds and hundreds of people coming here being upset about it,” Wood said. “Enrollment had declined so much that it just had to be done. We may get to that point, and it would probably call for a complete districtwide rezoning.”
Click LISTEN above to hear the entire conversation.
