Greene resident describes problems in North Butler school district

Letter to the editor by Kip Bouillon of Greene –

I am very proud to have been part of a group that in the last few weeks has come up with an excellent action plan for the North Butler School District’s problems. I support everything in the group’s action plan.

I would also like to add the following as my opinions. Please, do not take out your frustrations about whar I have to say on my parents’ businesses. They are hard working individuals and do not need the stress of your negative reactions to an honest opinion.

The group approached the school problems in a business environment and one key thing in looking at this is that you need to find root cause of the problems. You can not just find band-aid fixes which I feel the administration’s action plan is and unfortunately, so is ours. They both just buy time until another negative balance appears and we have to do this all over again.

At this time and with the information I have seen there are two possible root causes:
1. Poor bookkeeping skills and management of a budget. In order to figure this out we need to look back at the past and find out how the money was spent and where it went. If we find deficiencies in in previous budgets, we have found the root cause.

2. The second possible root cause is the most difficult because it deals with salaries.

Why is this subject so difficult? Because we are talking about peoples’ personal livelihoods. It could alter peoples’ lifestyles and maybe even cause loss of excellent quality teachers and staff.

First we need to look at what is going on in the world:

The state reduces funding for schools but tells us we need to offer quality education. Industries and government agencies are struggling and cutting wages in their work force.

In 2008, one person in our group was cut to 32 hours per week in their job because of the floods. This person being cut to 32 hours was offered, by their management, to either take a cut to 32 hours or they would start eliminating positions. John Deere has developed a two-tiered pay scale because of the change in the industry. When times were great for Deere, they offered their employees all they could and now that times are tighter they’ve had to reduce their offerings. Recently Butler County employees have adopted a two tier pay system as well. All county employees on the current payroll kept their wages and new employees hired after a certain date are hired on a lower pay scale.

If you look at one of the top paying industries in the area and what they would start out their certified staff (college degree positions) at is $30,000-$33,000 yearly/12 months out of the year.

The current salaries of the district make up for about 78% of the budget. In this budget, typically the certified staff’s wages dictate the percentage of wage increase. The state of Iowa lays out that a starting certified staff wage starts at $32,575. The North Butler district starting certified staff wage is $37,575.

A graph that was presented to the group showed a declining unspent balance for years. From 2005 to 2010 the districts were both participating in whole grade sharing. The Greene School District’s unspent balance was increasing on average $131,000 per year. The Allison-Bristow School District’s unspent balance was declining on average by $108,000. In the year prior to the consolidation,, (2010) Greene had $1,376,234 in unspent balance and Allison-Bristow had $72,846 unspent balance. After the consolidation, this approximate $1.45 million balance declined rapidly up until the 2012-2013 school year. The district posted a negative $42,000 unspent balance in 2012-2013 and in 2013-2014 year posted a negative $275,000 unspent balance. Looking into the decline of the unspent balance, the only figures that correlated to this decline were salaries. When the district consolidated, they were required to take on the salary schedule of the district with the highest enrollment. The historic Allison-Bristow district had approximately 2 more students and their historic pay scale was approximately 10% higher.

If this is the root cause, I feel the district needs to choose between these two possible options:
Adopt a two tiered pay scale similar to the Butler County employees.
Cut wages across the entire staff. What would this look like? Our current starting salaries for certified staff is 13% higher than the state base of $32,575. A 5% cut in wages would yield a savings of $300,000!. Still leaving us 7% above the state base wages.
The district also pays out approximately $15,540 per employee that qualify in benefits.. Would a reduced benefits package correct our negative unspent balance?

With this affecting our friends and families in the district you need to ask: “What are willing to do as a community to help in these measures?” One of my suggestions was to start a foundation which supports the school staff. School staff would be able to utilize money from the foundation to pay for the school supplies that they currently pay for out of their pockets. The foundation could help pay for their continuing education as well. And maybe if the foundation grew large enough, they could help with low-interest loans to the staff for home improvements within the district. This might sound like a crazy idea, but because we can not levy for money and the state dictates your income, why not support our staff with what we can. This option would need to be looked into for legal reasons. We would also need to see what it would cost for a group (lawyers/bankers) to manage of the foundation.

We also need to look to the state and federal government in the messages they are sending. What is the value of a child’s education? Politicians stand before people and say they want quality education, quality teachers with quality pay, but when it comes to budget, they are willing to sacrifice these items. If the state was willing to give 10% more per pupil this would raise our budget by $467,200. This increased revenue would put us in the black and we would not have to cut anything.

Our district’s board and administration must be more accountable. In gathering information for our meetings we never had the correct numbers. Here are a couple of examples: The current budget numbers provided by the district show that a bus driver is budgeted at their contract wage of $3,400. In the past years, the bus drivers have earned $15,000 to $24,000. If you look at teachers’ salaries over the past three years, you come up with 5 different figures and none of them follow a pay progression.

In a recent blog was posted by the administration, it stated that the only way to solve this problem is to cut staffing and any other savings are just nickel and diming or a temporary fix. Everyday people nickle and dime their own budgets to save money.

When faced with difficult decisions, measures have to be put into place but, closing the elementary in Greene does not solve the underlying issue and in 1 to 2 years, the district will be in same place looking to cut several thousands of dollars from the budget.

Thanks,
Kip Bouillon