The BOE met in a special session Monday night to review a department-by-department breakdown of Norwalk Public School's budget request.
"I wanted to have this meeting so that there would be some understanding on why we weren't presenting a zero increase budget," said interim Superintendent Dr. Michael Nast.
NPS had originally asked the City of Norwalk for $154.8 million but the budget approved by the BET is for only $149.7 million -- $5 million less. Interim CFO Dan Cook and Assistant Superintendent Tony Dadonna took the lead in explaining to the board during a 3 and a half hour meeting where they thought $3.5 million in cuts to staff and services could be made. However even with the cutbacks, NPS would be $1.5 million short of the City's number.
A summary of the cuts (posted below) shows that the biggest cut, $878,323, is in the Instruction department. A spreadsheet distributed at the meeting which details the cuts shows the Instructional department's budget declining by nearly 20%. The bulk of the cost savings will occur because there will be additional teacher retirements beyond the number anticipated when the budget was first prepared. Another area of significant cutbacks in this department will be in Professional Development. Mr. Dadonna explained to the board that he is hoping that much of the reduction in PD will be made up from grants.
One area of the cuts to Instructional funding which drew criticism from BOE member Migdalia Rivas was in a $8,000 cut in instructional equipment which includes things like maps, posters and other media which supplements text books. Ms. Rivas questioned the benefit of cutting tools that directly affected classroom learning.
Additional cuts were being proposed at the Middle School level by eliminating the AT program and the four teachers teaching it (see related story) and reducing up to 5 teachers at the high school level.
Some departments are using the budget crisis to their advantage by negotiating cost reduction from vendors. For example Joanna Garcia who overseas the District's relationship with transportation companies said that she is negotiating a new contract with the bus company that takes students to school and expects to recoup $100,000. The company that takes special needs children to school has already decreased their fees by $40,000.
Despite the cuts, Superintendent Nast explained that a shortfall remained. He distributed a one-sheet (posted below) which laid out two scenarios. In one, a number of unions representing school workers would make concessions totaling $1.4 million. Mr. Nast told the board that it was his understanding that if such concessions were made that the City of Norwalk would add money back to the schools' budget.
If these concessions were not made, then Mr. Nast listed an additional $1.6 million in cuts to staff and services including teacher's aides, literacy and numeracy specialists, and music teachers.
Budget Scenarios May 3
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Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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I'm not trying to shoot Bobby in the foot but the Technology director should be spear-heading an effort to consolidate all telecommunications costs by working with the town to reduce the number of phone lines per building and sharing a pool of numbers via fiber optic backbone. There is also a savings by using a different internet service provider and delivering that service over the wide area network that is shared with the town and the school district. It's this type of joint school/town effort that shows the citizens that the schools are serious in playing nice and making every effort to curtail costs in a smart and effective manner. This is as much a public image issue as it is a technical and financial issue that can be solved over the summer...not years. The savings on these 2 items alone could be hundreds of thousands of dollars and would be immediate because the cost of the services would be lower.
ReplyDeleteHow is the network set up now?
ReplyDeleteAgain--hello...is anyone listening??
ReplyDeleteso what are the details? what exactly will be cut?????? can we get a list please so we know what to fight for....
ReplyDeleteSorry for the delay in my response...the network between the schools ties back to town hall and is connectied via fiber-optics at gigabit speeds. To the average person, there isn't much meaning in this explanation but let's just say it is pretty fast between buildings.
ReplyDeleteOne thing is for sure...I'm not hired to do what I am saying Bob should be proposing...nor am I going to create the solution in this blog with such detail that I am basically doing Bob's job for him...although some would agree he is dead weight anyway.
What I'm suggesting is that the schools have a great superhighway to carry information(voice/data/video) to and from each school and administrative building, as well as among the municipal departments, we should be using it more than the 1% we currently do.
We should be doing remote backups between buildings, sharing voice lines, thereby reducing the number of lines verizon charges us for, delivering either streaming or live video feeds over the network, etc. We should be looking at terminal servers to extend the life of our aging computers.
This is not rocket science nor is it kids stuff. These are common things most tech directors chat about at conferences and workshops.
However, I want to reiterate I'm not going to do his job for him. If the fire is not lit under him to do some of these things, only a couple of conclusions can be made...he simply is incapable of doing so or he/the administration does not see this as either viable or important. When this could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don't see how this is trivial.
You people have too much time on your hands....
ReplyDelete