School Cutbacks?

The Mountain Home School District is facing tough financial times and will probably wind up cutting some teaching and non-teaching positions, as well as reorganizing where students will be going to school next year, Supt. Tim McMurtrey warned in an e-mail he sent to the district's staff last week.

Two factors prompted that warning, he explained in his e-mail.

"Because of recent developments with the sagging economy and our declining enrollment, we are forced to look at decreasing our budgets at all levels to get closer to the level that the state reimburses us for all our staffing allowances," he said in the e-mail.

"To make matters worse," he continued, "as of the Nov. 18, 2008 enrollment count, we are down 89 students from last year, which equates to a significant loss of revenue."

School districts receive the bulk of their funding from the state, which relies on what is called Average Daily Attendance (ADA), the average number of students in class each day, to determine how much of the state's education funding pie is distributed to each school district.

The Mountain Home School District has been on a roller coaster ride the last few years in terms of enrollment, sometimes spiking upward, sometimes dropping. The current drop in enrollment, which is spread out over almost all grade levels, equates to the equivalent of four to five classrooms/teachers worth of students.

"If they were all in the same grade, then it would be easy," to make the necessary decisions on how to meet the anticipated funding shortfall, McMurtrey told the Mountain Home News.

He said he sent the e-mail as a warning to staff and as an effort to generate ideas on the best way to handle the changes he anticipates will take place next fall.

At the time he sent the e-mail out, the district had been warned by the state to expect a 1 percent decrease in funding next school year. Following Gov. Otter's announcement this week of further cuts, the local school district is expecting the bite to be even bigger.

Currently, McMurtrey said, the district has ten more certified (teacher) positions and twenty classified positions (cooks, janitors and classroom aides) on the books than the state's standards recommend.

McMurtrey warned staff that a Reduction in Force may be necessary for next year, but said he hoped that standard attrition would prevent that. Twice in the last decade the district has faced the problem of potentially firing staff to meet funding levels, but in both cases enough teachers and classified staff retired or resigned that the district was able to avoid doing so.

That warning comes amid teacher negotiations that have stalled this year, and, as has been common in recent years, the district and the teacher's union are operating without a contract for this school year. The current hang-up involves salary compensation and last week the two sides agreed to third-party fact finding to help resolve the dispute as to how much money is available for teacher salaries.

McMurtrey said that if a RIF is invoked, the district would work closely with the union "to ensure that the needs and desires of the current certified staff are taken into consideration during the reorganization."

McMurtrey said the biggest issue the district faces, however, is the overcrowding situation at Hacker Middle School. It was the overcrowding there that prompted the district to seek the recent failed school bond, which would have added classrooms at the current junior high, allowing the district to move all high school grades, 9-12 into that building. Making that move would have allowed the district to re-arrange grade levels at other schools, relieving the Hacker overcrowding.

The current plan the district has to solve that problem for the next school year is to have the junior high and the high school "share" ninth-grade students, and move two temporary buildings (one from West and one from Hacker) to the high school.

Some ninth-grade students already utilize classes at the high school and McMurtrey sees at least half of them now shifting there. That would allow for some efficiencies in the use of classroom and teachers, and help expand some offering available to the freshmen.

Some additional time between classes may be required to accommodate students who must go from classrooms at the junior high to the high school, and vice versa, under that plan.

The ninth-grade students will be placed on the same block schedule as the high school, no matter what building they are in, start times at the junior high may be staggered to prevent overcrowding, and the junior high will probably be segregated with areas clearly set aside for ninth-grade students and areas dedicated to other students there.

Currently, the junior high has grades 8 and 9 and Hacker has grades 5-7, but under the district's plan the seventh grade will be moved to the junior high, leaving Hacker with only grades 5 and 6.

"No matter what, we had to get Hacker down to two grades," McMurtrey said, indicating the current plan was pretty much locked in stone as far as concept was concerned, but he is soliciting input from the district's staff to help work out the technical details of making it work.