Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
BOCA RATON — The school board and its advisory committee got their first look Wednesday at the complete proposed budget for the next school year, with about $33.5 million in cuts.
The advisory committee, followed by the school board, will spend the next month examining those cuts.
“It’s a system-wide problem,” board Chairman Frank Barbieri said of the district’s budget woes. “It will take a system-wide solution.”
Chief Financial Officer Mike Burke said that after the legislature completed its proposed budget late Tuesday, it appeared state money for education could be cut about 8 percent. The loss to the district will be about $92 million in state money, with millions more in federal stimulus money also no longer available .
Board member Chuck Shaw called the cuts to state education money the worst since the state funding system was created in 1973.
To try to make up those losses, the district plans to use federal grants and money from the sale of property associated with Palm Beach Public School, Burke said.
Much of the lost stimulus money is being offset by the 3 percent contribution the state is requiring employees to make to their retirement funds.
The district expects a $35.4 million budget shortfall, Burke said. The budget recommendations from Superintendent Bill Malone call for eliminating at least 766 positions. Most of the proposed layoffs are in support departments such as police officers, painters, psychologists, non-classroom teachers and custodians.
Malone proposed laying off 244 school monitors and 23 high school secretaries as well as cutting 10 positions at alternative schools such as the district’s program at the Department of Juvenile Justice’s detention center for juvenile offenders. Burke said the cuts amount to a reduction of less than 1 percent of the overall budgets at the schools.
“This is a pretty good effort to keep the schools as held harmless as possible,” Burke said.
The school board will hold a budget workshop on June 1, Burke said.
Barbieri said he’s looking at ways to spread the burden across the entire district, such as employee furloughs.
Malone has said that he hopes many of the laid-off employees can fill other vacant district jobs .
In other business, the school board listened to a report on projections for enrollment growth and school capacity issues through the 2015-16 school year. District officials estimated that enrollment would grow by about 5,600 students in that time – 2,400 in elementary school, 1,100 in middle school, 1,600 in high school and the rest in other programs.
