School budget cut ‘scenarios’ to be considered next week

Scenarios for school district budget cuts will be discussed by the Board of Education next week.

In conjunction with the administration of Metro Nashville Public Schools, the board will meet on Tuesday of next week to prepare for the possibility of funding cuts. While it’s not definite that cuts will be necessary, a struggling economy and lower-than-projected sales tax revenues have district leaders working to stay ahead of trouble.

Steve Glover, chair of the school board’s budget and finance committee, said Tuesday that the purpose of the meeting is to “educate” board members. If sales tax revenues continue to falter, quick action could be required as early as in December.

“We’ll play out some scenarios,” Glover said. “We need to be preparing [to determine], if this trend continues, where we are going to make reductions.”

The meeting next week will technically be a meeting of the board’s budget and finance committee, though Glover said he expects most board members to be present. At the committee’s most recent meeting, last month, board members and the district announced a “soft” hiring freeze affecting positions not related to teaching. Layoffs of staff have not been considered, officials say.

On Monday, board chair David Fox told members of the Metro Council that work is being done to be prepared in the event that cuts are necessary. He reminded Council members of the $19 million pulled from the district’s reserves to finance this year’s budget, as well as the $52 million in undesignated funds remaining in the reserves.

“We don’t want to be caught off guard,” Fox said. “We have reserves. We can utilize them.”

The district is working to trim expenditures this current school year, following several months of sales tax revenues coming in below projections. The budget for the school year counted on receiving about $3 million more in sales tax revenues than what has been collected, to date, for the first few months of the school year.

That’s only a drop in the bucket of the district’s total $627 million operating budget, and sales tax revenues are not the only sources of income for MNPS. Still, with a struggling economy and revenue trends that are already worrisome, officials agree the situation merits attention.

In addition to early trouble with revenues, school district officials have regularly noted that this year’s operating budget also includes expenditures requested by two entities outside the school district, Mayor Karl Dean and the Tennessee Department of Education. Those additional expenditures would have put pressure on this year’s budget, even if revenues were on track.

Dean asked the district to add bus monitors to every one of Metro’s more than 217 special education transport vehicles, after the budget for the current school year was complete. The total cost of those monitors is estimated to cost about $3.2 million — prior to Dean’s recommendation, the district had funds budgeted for only 20 bus monitor positions, and not all of those were necessarily filled.

School districts in all six counties contiguous to Davidson have one monitor budgeted for each special education bus, as do most urban districts in the state, according to information gathered by MNPS at Dean’s request. Also, the district is currently the target of a class action lawsuit, after the alleged sexual assault of two young special education students traveling in special education school buses. The assaults are believed to have been committed by other students; special education kids of various ages and conditions travel on the same buses together.

The budget and finance committee will meet at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, prior to the board’s regularly scheduled meeting at 2601 Bransford Ave.