Funding Presentation, School Phase-out Resolution In Store for Board

School funding may be a key theme in tonight’s meeting of the Paulding County School Board. Board members will meet at 6:15 today at East Paulding High School.

According to the board’s agenda, officials are slated to hear Doug Eza, a consultant to Georgia school systems in the area of budget preparation. Eza, who retired in 2003 as Oconee County’s assistant superintendent for operations, will give a presentation entitled "Explaining Public School Funding in Paulding County."

The presentation comes as the district nears the end of its fiscal year 2011 budget and approaches crunch time for creating the FY2012 budget. In an interview with Dallas-Hiram Patch last month, Superintendent Cliff Cole said the system could be in for some deep cuts even from the starting point of this year’s approximately $189 million budget that necessitated a school calendar of 176 student days—four less than the typical 180-day calendar—and 10 unpaid leave days for staff.

“From what we’ve been told from the state Department of Education, [we should] expect a 1-percent cut in our state funding, or our QBE funding,” Cole said, adding that the reduction would be about a $4.1 million drop. He added that the preliminary budget numbers also indicate an estimated 5-percent drop in the local tax digest, which would mean for the district another drop of about $3.3 million.

“So we’re looking for the upcoming year somewhere on the low end of a $7.5 million reduction in our budget—it could be as high as $12 million,” he said. “The thing about our funding from the state is [that while] people see revenues from the state going up, because of the funding mechanism, we’re a year to 18 months behind. Once you start seeing the revenues in the state going up, we don’t start seeing those increases probably until a year or a year and a half after that.

Should expected cuts come to fruition, Cole said officials would look to operate under a 176-school-day calendar similar to the current one, which also would include the 10 unpaid leave days felt by staff this year. System leaders also would be looking at reducing some positions through attrition with the aim of not impacting classrooms.

“We’ll have to go through and see where we can make additional cuts,” he added.

Should the financial picture be better for the district, Cole said his goal would be to add some school days back to the calendar.

School board members could approve a FY2012 budget between the first part of May and the first part of June.

P.B. Ritch phase-out resolution up for consideration

Another item on the agenda that has financial implications is a resolution to phase out P.B. Ritch Elementary.

Officials said the school needs about $4 million in renovations and modifications, while closing the school would save nearly $800,000 annually by closing the school (.). But several members of the school community who spoke during that meeting and at (.) say they don’t want to see the school close.

Should board members approve the resolution, they would still need to take a vote in the future to actually close the school. District leaders say the school will remain in operation for at least one more year, the 2011-2012 school year.

We will be live-tweeting tonight’s meeting—follow us on Twitter @DallasPatch for up-to-the-minute updates.