Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

Dear friends and neighbors:

Please feel free to raise any questions that you may have about the upcoming school levy here, or by sending me an e-mail (bdrigelman@aol.com). I will try to answer them as quickly as I can.

Those of you who know me also know that I have been perhaps the most fiscally conservative person to serve on the school board in recent memory. Working closely with Gail Oakes, I have devoted myself primarily to bringing fiscal responsibility and accountability to the PLSD's finances. With Wes Monhollen's election to the school board, we are finally starting to make some headway.

Thus I did not conclude lightly that a 7.9 mill operating levy is necessary. I have to tell you that without additional revenues, we will need to cut into the heart of our schools. I do not believe that anyone wants to do that.

The current crisis is driven more by revenue shortfalls and miscalculations than by spending increases. Thus, although we have tried to close the anticipated gap, to the degree possible, with spending cuts, there aren't a lot of easy cuts to make. Most of the cuts we are making affect people, and the people affected, understandably, would rather that we cut somewhere else. But we have run out of ''somewhere elses'' to cut. Everyone is going to need to tighten their belt.

We also could not realize significant savings by not opening the new high school and junior high. These schools are being furnished and equipped with bond proceeds, not operating revenues. And most of the personnel who will staff these schools are already on board. We have drastically cut back the number of new positions that will be created next year. Thus the greatest additional operating expense associated with opening the schools is utility costs. Since, however, we must heat these buildings whether we use them or not (or their pipes will burst), even here the savings would not be substantial.

If we had to buy more portable classrooms to house our burgeoning enrollment, even those savings would be lost. Portable classrooms are not cheap. They also are expensive to heat and maintain, have short useful lives, overburden the common facilities of the schools that use them, and present safety and security concerns. Frankly, we need to get rid of them.

I am hoping that we can realize some significant savings in the area of transportation. Most of our buses travel half empty. We need to fill them up. Also, because of our current grade configuration, we send buses through each neighborhood four times each day. We need to cut this in half. The state auditors' office currently is helping us estimate the savings we could realize in this area. Already, it appears that going to all day, every other day kindergarten could net a three-year savings of almost $700,000.

We're trying to meet the taxpayers half way, and to close as much of the current budget gap with expense cuts as possible. We will do everything we can to avoid cutting extra-curriculars. But even if we can find some way to keep them in place for another year, without additional revenue, it would be difficult to keep them in place for more than one year. The budget gap is forecast only to widen in the coming years.

We already have voted to charge students fees to participate in extra-curriculars. These fees will be substantial, but are unlikely to cover more than 25% of the total cost to the PLSD of maintaining these programs.

Keep asking questions, however. The schools belong to all of us, not just the school board. This is a community problem. We all need to participate in solving it.

Best regards, Bruce

I'll start with a few

Bruce...

I've heard some discussions with some interesting numbers and would like your take...

1. How much has the cost of supplimental contracts increased over the past four years for the after school activities? I believe it's something like over $950k now, what was it in 1998?

2. How much have PLSD teachers received in increases (salary table adjustments and annual cost of living) on average (both in dollars and percentage change) since 1998?

3. Just how many ''athletic director'' or ''assistant athletic director'' positions does the PLSD have and at what level? How many in 1998?

4. Since PLSD meets all the ''standards,'' what percentage of the PHS grads go on to college? How well do they do in their freshman year (i.e. need for remedial classes, etc). Has this gone up or down since the early 1990's?

5. How much has the public ''invested'' in the sports complex at PHSN? I'm being told that my guess was low by a factor of 5x... PHSN facilities equal to or better than PHSC?

a couple of questions

Bruce...
Thanks for your hard work I have a couple of questions.
1 - does eliminating the supplemental contracts eliminate the activity, or just the pay that the caoch, director, etc receives? for example, could the football team still exist with ''volunteer'' coaches?
2 - i've read nothing from the teachers union about the current crisis, other thatn they don't want grade re-configuration. have, or will they come to the table with anything to offer such as forgoing their planned pay raise, contributing to health care cost, etc? from what i read, they control 80% of the budget - in the business world, concessions and renegotiations are common occurances for the good of the organization.
thanks

Answers -- Round 1 -- Part 1

Dear friends and neighbors:

Thanks for the questions. Please forgive my delay in answering them.

1. As to the PLSD's extra-curricular and supplemental expenses, to avoid comparing applies and oranges, I have used the amounts reported for the PLSD's General Fund Account No. 4000. This is the account the PLSD generally uses to report extra-curricular expenses. It does not include all supplementals (some of which are not related to extra-curricular expenses), and probably includes some items that it should not. However, it is the closest I can come to a reasonable basis for comparison.

Proceeding on this basis, it appears that the PLSD spent $664,556 on extra-curricular activities for the school year ended June 1998. Supplemental payments, and related fringe benefit expense, accounted for $611,212 (or roughtly 92%) of this total.

For the current school year, a total of $1,140,589 originally was appropriated for extra-curriculars, with supplementals and fringes accounting for $1,037,227 (or roughly 91%) of the total.

Please bear in mind that booster groups traditionally have provided a substantial share of the funding for our sports teams and marching band. We should all be duly grateful for these contributions. Without them, these programs would be impossible.

These private fundraising efforts, however, still leave the PLSD more than $1 million short. This is far more than we could reasonably make up with student participation fees.

2. Although supplementals and related fringes are the primary extra-curricular cost, there are other expenses, such as the cost of transporting our players and band to away games. In the unlikely event that we could staff our teams with full qualified volunteer coaches, and assuming players were willing to pay their own transportation, equipment and uniform costs, we might be able to field teams without supplementals. But that seems unlikely.