School districts look for ways to make ends meet

School board members are making a list and checking it twice, but this post-holiday exercise isn't likely to delight families with students.

Several south-metro districts have known for months that they'll need to make budget cuts for next year, but they're no longer the only ones. Other districts are joining their ranks after increasingly dire predictions about how schools might be hit by a $4.8 billion state deficit projected for the next two years.

Some school leaders are already combing through lists of possible cuts, looking for ways to make ends meet while hurting kids as little as possible.

The draft list of $6 million in cuts that Lakeville school board members saw for the first time Thursday night included the equivalent of more than 60 employees, from teachers to groundskeepers. Programs such as elementary guidance could disappear, and the district could charge students $150 a year to ride the bus if they live between a half-mile and 2 miles from school.

"The saddest day will be when I have to vote on this," said 12-year board veteran Judy Keliher.

District leaders have known the cuts were coming since voters nixed a 2007 levy request. Next year, the district says it will need to cut another $3.8 million, and those cuts could include closing an as-yet-unidentified elementary school in 2010-11.

In Jordan, school board members could trim next year's budget by $500,000 after voters rejected a school levy request last fall, Superintendent Kirk Nelson said. The district started tough talks with a long list of possible reductions that ran from cutting teachers and secretaries to charging admission at school concerts.

"We had a meeting in December, and at that time, I thought school districts would be held harmless" by the Legislature, he said.

But now, many school administrators believe the worst-case scenario could be a drop in state education funding, not just a freeze. Even so, guessing what the Legislature might do is so tricky that his district will stick with its initial budget numbers, Rimstad said. "If that's not sufficient, we're going to have to make it up in 2010-11," he said.

Meanwhile, many school districts that hoped to avoid cuts a few months ago are now pulling out the red pens.

"Obviously, that has a big impact on the budget, so we are in the midst of looking at our plans and plugging in those kinds of scenarios," said John Currie, superintendent of the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District. The district will have an $18 million budget gap next year if it gets no new money from the Legislature, according to numbers released last month by the Association of Metropolitan School Districts. The district won't need to cut nearly that much, largely because it had already planned to tap into a $41 million fund balance, Currie said. But "you can't do that for very long," he said, adding that he probably will recommend cuts of some kind to the school board.

For the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District, "the problem is looking out two years from now," district business manager Mark Stotts said. If the district does nothing this spring, it could face cuts of $5.5 million to $7 million for the 2010-11 school year, he said. District leaders said they could keep class sizes stable for three years after voters approved a referendum in 2007, but if the district can make cuts now and still keep that pledge, Stotts said he'll recommend them.