Facing aid loss, county district to cut expenses
School chief: Going to have to manage
The Pulaski County Special School District — the recipient of millions in state desegregation aid for nearly three decades — is being transformed in its finances and programs to operate like most other districts.
“We’re trying to look at how we can be more efficient,” Superintendent Jerry Guess said in describing revenue and cost projections for the 2017-18 school year that are nearly $30 million less than this year’s amounts. Those differences in part are because of the scheduled end of $20.8 million a year in state desegregation aid but also because of the detachment last year of the new 4,000-student Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District from the Pulaski County Special district.
“This district is going to have to manage itself like every other district in Arkansas for a change,” Guess said in an interview. “We aren’t going to have any additional money like we had with desegregation money to use for services that are outside what other districts do. If we are running six extra buses that we shouldn’t have to be running, we’ve got to eliminate those six buses. If we’ve got positions in a building that are not required by state education standards and are not otherwise needed, we may have to reduce them.”
The district is projected to have operating revenue and expenditures of about $123 million in the 2017-18
school year, down from about $152 million in expenses this year. Some of that $29 million difference melts away in large chunks.
About $18 million of the difference between this year and next is related to the one-time exchange of assets between the Pulaski County Special and Jacksonville district in the current school year and the resulting payoff of construction bonds.
Additionally, the district this year is making its last $3.3 million payment to the Donaldson’s Scholars Program, a summer college preparatory program for students who might not otherwise consider college. The district no longer will have a $1 million obligation to the Little Rock School District for magnet schools.
Guess, Chief Financial Officer Denise Palmer and other district staff members are preparing a 2017-18 operating budget that includes an $800,000 reduction in state-licensed faculty at the middle and high schools; an $842,000 reduction in support staff across the system; an $830,500 cut in school bus transportation services; a $1.3 million deferment of 16 school bus purchases; and an $800,000 reduction in costs in the operation of five schools in the district’s southeast section including Mills University Studies High School.
The superintendent said he doesn’t know yet how many licensed and support-service positions will be reduced, but his division directors have reported that they believe they can reduce expenses by $337,000 in maintenance, $180,000 in security, $106,000 in student nutrition, $185,000 in technology and $32,000 in pupil personnel services.
“We’re not sure how many people it will take,” Guess said, adding that consolidation of jobs will be considered along with jobs that are vacated through retirements and resignations. “We’re not through,” he said. The cuts in transportation expenses will reflect the end of transporting students to and from magnet schools and specialty programs in the Little Rock and North Little Rock School districts, as well as an end to transporting the district’s own students outside their attendance zones to special program schools, including Mills. Discontinuing the intradistrict bus transportation will save as much as $400,000, he said.
Additionally, district leaders also are transferring expenses to different revenue sources such as state alternative education funding and federal Title I funds as another way to absorb the loss of desegregation aid to the operating budget. The desegregation aid can be spent only on school building costs in what will be the final year of the payment, according to a January 2014 settlement agreement in a long-running federal desegregation lawsuit.
Teachers in the district’s multiage classrooms for students not successful in traditional classes will be paid from the state alternative education money, a savings of $637,706 to the operating budget, Guess said.
The district also will reduce the overall number of instructional facilitators in the middle and high schools, and assign the costs for the four facilitators working with teachers and student achievement at Fuller and Mills to the Title I money.
The three state-required school-improvement specialists for schools labeled as being in academic distress also will be paid out of Title I money, according to the budget plans.
In still another effort to rein in expense and the result of the detachment of the Jacksonville district, Pulaski County Special has been able to reduce its overall funding obligation for special-education services, generating a projected savings of about $300,000.
The School Board for the Pulaski County Special district approved the budget-cutting plans last week with a 6-1 vote.
Board member Tina Ward who represents Zone 2 encompassing the southeast section of Pulaski County voted “no” after hearing district plans to discontinue busing students to the gifted-education programs at Mills, College Station Elementary and Fuller Middle school from elsewhere in the district, and to discontinue college-style 90-minute block scheduling at Mills in favor of seven class periods a day.
Students in the Mills scholars program will be required to take four Advanced Placement courses a year, rather than the currently required five, to earn a Scholars Diploma. There are 130 students in the Mills Scholars program, 27 of whom are bused from outside the attendance zone. The school’s enrollment is almost 600.
Forty-nine children are bused to the College Station and Fuller campuses from outside the attendance zones.
Ward questioned whether district leaders were “giving up” on Mills because the school is labeled by the state as academically distressed. That’s because fewer than half of Mills students scored at proficient or better levels on state math and literacy tests over a three-year period.
“We aren’t giving up on any school,” Janice Warren, the district’s assistant superintendent for equity and pupil services and director of elementary education, responded. She said that the district is harming the students by not doing more to improve their achievement and remove the school from the academic-distress classification. She also said that changes have been in the planning for three years.
District leaders plan to convert Mills from a college-style AB block class schedule to a more traditional seven-period course day, which is the structure at other high schools in the district. Mills and nearby Fuller Middle and College Station Elementary schools also will be affected by plans to end busing of students from other parts of the district who chose to attend the special program schools in the southeast part of the district.
Jaime Rollans, director of the Advanced Placement program at Mills, asked the board for one more school year of the once nationally and state renowned Scholars program as it is currently configured. That would allow this year’s juniors to graduate from Mills.
The specialty gifted-education programs in Mills, College Station and Fuller were started about 25 years ago to promote desegregation.
John Tackett, assistant superintendent for learning services and director of secondary education, presented to the School Board plans to turn Mills and the three other district high schools into “schools of innovation,” which are permitted by state law. The schools — subject to an application and approval by the Arkansas education commissioner — would feature flexible course schedules, opportunities for concurrent college credits, online and traditional classroom instruction, internships and hands-on problem-solving projects.
Guess said he welcomes the opportunity for stability in the district after years of operating under state control, planning for the detachment of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski district and phasing out the state desegregation funds.
The district also is building a new Mills High and a new Robinson Middle School and will ask voters May 9 to approve a continuation of tax mills to support expansion of Sylvan Hills High.
“It’s an exciting time for the schools here in PCSSD,” Guess said. “In the school business you usually know what you did this year so you know what you can do next year. We haven’t had that in 5½ years. Every year has been ‘What we can do new to save money?’”