School district administrators outline 2019-20 budgets
LANSDALE >> As budget talks begin in earnest for the North Penn School District, three administrators have outlined their plans for the next year.
The school board heard detailed budget presentations from the human resources, special education and curriculum development departments during the board’s finance committee meeting on Feb. 4.
Human resources
Director of Human Resources Cheryl McCue said her department handles a roughly $4 million budget each year, largely for salaries and benefits for substitute teachers at all levels, since the HR department oversees all district hiring and personnel requirements.
“Our goal in HR is to recruit, hire, and retain the most highly qualified staff members and personnel, to support the core mission of teaching and learning,” she said.
Over the past eight years, McCue told the board, the HR department has reduced the number of fulltime employees covered by North Penn’s medical plan by more than 300 employees, leading to a current savings of $4.4 million each year and a cumulative savings of more than $20 million over that time.
“With the implementation of full-day kindergarten and an increase in the number of full-time employees, the number of benefited employees and the associated costs are likely to increase,” she said.
The HR budget also covers employee assistance programs, substitute teachers, professional developed and tuition reimbursement, McCue said. As negotiated in their union contracts, teachers now cannot apply random credits from educational courses outside of degree tracks toward their movement up their pay scale, and can now only move up the pay scale by one horizontal column each year, changes that she said have produced significant savings.
“The realized savings over the course of the last three years were $264,000, in just the last three years,” by limiting the column movement pay increases, she said.
The HR department has also found smaller savings by moving from paper to electronic records for interviewing, on-boarding of new employees, and storage of personnel records, McCue said.
Board member Jonathan Kassa said he had heard high praise from residents about the quality of new mental health specialists hired by the district over the past year, and was glad to hear the HR department had done so while staying within budget.
“There is a need to have that type of resource. We met it, and this is still fitting roughly within the budget from last year,” he said.
Curriculum
Assistant Superintendent Jenna Rufo presented on the roughly $5.6 million curriculum department budget, roughly 30 percent of which goes to wages for administrators, department chairs and staff who write student curriculums, and 27 percent toward core curriculum items like textbooks and digital resources.
“W’er a learning organization, so the majority of the curriculum budget is dedicated to just that: work books, text books, digital resources, things of that nature,” Rufo said.
Planning an all-new curriculum for the district’s new full-day kindergarten program is budgeted at $500,000 for the upcoming year, Rufo told the board, and that initiative has led staff to begin a reevaluation of the entire social studies curriculum from kindergarten through sixth grades.
The other major impact to the budget, Rufo told the board, will be on the professional development line item: roughly $322,000 is budgeted, but that’s roughly $150,000 below prior years, by limiting the use of outside consultants and relying more on internal staff and their expertise.
“We really have a very talented staff within North Penn, and my belief is that we need to educate those individuals, and build capacity,” she said.
Board member Christian Fusco said in roughly 20 years as an educator, he often wondered about the value of outside consultants, and was glad to see staff training being handled more in-house.
“I’m often wondering why we spent so much looking to people on the outside, so kudos for moving us in that direction,” he said.
Special education
Director of Special Education Ann Marie Lucas presented on the $53.8 million special education and student services budget, the largest of the three and one with strict standards to meet.
“Personnel costs, as you’ve heard from the others, is taking up a large part of our budget, and then instruction and service-type supports are the other,” she said.
“This budget includes special education, counseling services, nursing services, specialty services, home-bound instruction, student assistance programming, mental health services, and also alternative education for disruptive youths,” Lucas said.
Roughly 80 percent of the $53.8 million goes to personnel costs, largely for special education instructors, and roughly $3.4 million to out of district placements for students with unique needs, an increase of about half a percent from the current year.
“There are many, many non-discretionary costs associated with this budget, in special ed especially. It is a very under-funded mandate, and we do a very good job of making sure we have robust programming in place for students,” she said.
Not included in the draft budget is a request for seven additional special education instructors to help with speech, gifted education, and psychology staff, whom Lucas said are “at their max, for their case loads, or they’re hovering near.”
“We need to do something to provide them some relief, especially at the secondary areas,” she said.
The department currently has the equivalent of 6.5 employees trained in board certified behavioral analysis, Lucas told the board, and the department is requesting one more be added. Board member and finance committee chairman Ed Diasio said the discussion about specific staffing levels should be held for executive sessions, likely to be held before or after the board’s Feb. 12 finance committee and full board meetings.
Kassa said he hopes and expects that the implementation of full day kindergarten could help better identify specific student needs earlier, and cut down on the need for specialized individual instruction and interventions later on.
“When we have full day kindergarten, starting at the beginning, we’re balancing that checkbook, so to speak, and getting it right with those interventions early,” he said.
Lucas and Fusco both pointed out one item on the revenue side of that department’s budget: $2.2 million in federal IDEA funds, allocated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Fusco said that amount was “probably significantly less than what the law really should mandate for special ed expenses,” and Lucas agreed.
“When IDEA came out, it was supposed to be 40 percent funded, and we’ve not seen anywhere near that,” she said.
North Penn’s School Board Finance Committee next meets at 6 p.m. on Feb. 12 and the full board meets at 7:30 p.m that night, both at the district Educational Services Center, 401 E. Hancock St.