Editor’s note: The print version of this story contained incorrect numbers in reference to a special education teacher being transferred to Van Buren Elementary School to fill an opening. It has been corrected in this version to note that Brown County Intermediate School has three teachers to serve 28 students with individualized education plans.
Brown County Schools is down 86 students compared to last year, but the district is committed to making sure that doesn’t affect the education of the remaining students.
The decrease in enrollment means the district will get $500,000 less than it was planning to get for its general fund, which is used to pay teachers and staff.
“We are not cutting any programs because of the financial reality, and that’s because, and only because, this district goes after grant dollars,” said Superintendent Laura Hammack.
“From the Lilly Counseling grant, to the ROI (Regional Opportunities Initiative) grant, to all of the Title grants, we supplement our budget big time with dollars to be able to make sure that boys and girls do not notice that this situation is taking place.”
On this year’s student count day Sept. 14, 1,792 students were counted.
On count day last September, that number was 1,878.
At the end of last school year, Hammack had projected the district would lose about 45 students this school year.
“It really was a disappointment when we have ultimately realized 86 students (is the) sum total down,” she said.
“When we look across the schools, there’s really no one school that has realized a more significant loss than another. In fact, Helmsburg and Van Buren are both up just a little bit, but the other schools were down just a little bit.”
The state pays a school district “tuition support” for each student enrolled. That money goes into a district’s general fund. Brown County Schools recently cut nearly $1.5 million from that budget due to declining enrollment, and created an enrollment forecast for the next 10 years.
“I am kind of disappointed that we’re right,” Hammack said. “When we did the forecasting for most likely enrollment for where we would be this school year, we’re pretty much spot on.”
At that time, the most likely forecast she had presented for the 2018-2019 school year was 1,821, and for the 2019-2020 school year, 1,782.
“Ultimately, the (low) birth rate has translated now into kindergarten. Our kindergarten is down compared to the year prior,” Hammack said.
The fact that Brown County has a lower number of young families living or moving here has contributed to the decline, Hammack said.
The age groups that make up the majority of residents are people 45 and older, and that’s also the group as a whole that’s had the largest increase in its population, she said.
Long-term plans
The school district will continue to try to match its staffing with the number of students being served, but not by cutting jobs people are currently filling.
“In superintendents school, you’re taught that when you can realize a student teacher ratio of 25 students per classroom that you are running your district in the black,” Hammack said.
Class sizes in Brown County don’t meet that mark.
“We have elementary classes of 16, 18, 19, some that are 22, 24. … We’re just really out of balance with that,” she said.
“I think our community would really prefer, from the feedback I’ve received, class sizes of 22 to 26. … That’s a target I’d like for us ultimately to hit.”
The school board and Hammack are committed to not issuing “reduction in force” notices.
“They don’t want folks coming to work and being concerned that they’re not going to have a job next year,” she said.
One way the district is looking to cut costs and correct the ratio of students to teachers is through attrition, not filling jobs when they open.
Recently, a Van Buren Elementary School teacher left the district for another opportunity. Instead of hiring a new teacher, a special education teacher was moved from Brown County Intermediate School to Van Buren. That left three teachers at BCIS to work with 28 special education students.
One teacher works with students who have severe or moderate needs. The remaining two teachers work with the other special education students. There are also eight special education paraprofessionals who assist in that education.
The first question everyone asks Hammack when talking about decreases in funding is if a school will have to be closed.
“My answer to that is very much from the heart: I don’t think we have enough data yet, but we will be collecting data to best inform that decision,” she said.
At a community conversation at 6 p.m. this Thursday in the Goldberg Room, she intends to address that question in a discussion on school financing.
“What we would intentionally do is, if we found over the next year or two that the data continues to inform this downward trend, we expect that we would engage with the community about what that next step needs to look like,” she said.
“I’m very interested in hearing from the community about that decision, what that would look like. Again, it’s such an emotional decision I really want to come at it from a position of having information, evidence and data.”
Bringing kids back
One piece of data the district will be eager to see will come in December when the fall 2018-2019 Public Corporation Transfer Report is released. It will show where local students are attending school if they aren’t attending Brown County schools.
Last year, the report showed that 199 students living in Brown County chose to go elsewhere. Ninety-six of them were going to the Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson United School District in southern Johnson County (Indian Creek). That was the largest group going to a particular school.
Bartholomew County schools took 30 students with Monroe County and six other districts attracting others.
Twenty-six students attended faith-based schools last year using Indiana Choice Scholarships, or vouchers.
Starting in 2007, the state did away with the transfer fees districts used to charge when students came in from other districts, Hammack said during a community economic development conversation earlier this month. That’s around the time enrollment in BCS started to fall, when it became easier for parents to take their children to schools closer to where they work.
The district’s greatest competition is other public schools, she said. Some schools are even recruiting athletes in Brown County.
“Over the course of two full school years, we’re looking at 200 to 210 students down. That’s about a school,” she told the economic conversation group.
Hammack estimated earlier this month that about 300 students living in Brown County were being homeschooled.
One way to boost enrollment and create revenue could be offering virtual online education, Hammack said. That would provide opportunities for homeschool or other families to be “students” of Brown County Schools without being in a classroom.
“(Local) students can actually enroll for free in these experiences, but then you, ultimately, as a school district can count that student,” Hammack said.
Other school districts offer that type of service to students outside their district for a low fee, she said.
“We have all the bones to be able to deliver it, we just don’t have the content yet. It’s hard work, but I think in the course of a year, we could get to a place where next fall we could offer some of these experiences and then be able to potentially win back some of the bodies that are out there maybe accessing other virtual online options,” Hammack said.
The transfer report, coming in December, will show how many students are attending online school, and that will help the district to decide if offering a virtual option is viable. According to last year’s transfer report, 22 Brown County students were attending online schools instead of schools in this district.
Another cost-saving measure is hiring part-time people to fill jobs in food service or custodial services so the district would not be required to provide health insurance and other benefits, which can cost as much as $20,000 per employee. Instead, they could receive memberships to the school’s Brown County Health and Wellness Center.
Current employees would be grandfathered into their current benefit plans; any changes would apply to future employees, she said.
The district’s food service fund is running in the red. The general fund has had to supplement food services by about $100,000 over the last two years.
“We’ve had too many folks employed. We have downsized,” Hammack said. “Then, when positions become available, we’re replacing them with part-time positions.”
One of the factors in the food service department budget deficit is uncollected lunch fees.
Student course fees and annual book rental fees also are going unpaid.
“We’re running at about $35,000 uncollected in course fees. That was another wake-up call for us at the end of the year. That’s almost a teacher salary right there,” she said.
“We are looking at ways on how we’re going about making our collections. We’ve had multiple meetings about strategies on how to address that.
“We just have to work with our families to allow them to understand that this is a negative impact on the school district when we are not receiving those funds,” she said.
Hammack believes that rural schools were unintentionally penalized when the state changed its “complexity index,” a piece of the formula that determines how much the state pays schools for each child enrolled. The complexity index generates about $1.2 million of the annual funding local schools receive.
It used to be based on the number of students on free or reduced lunch. More than 50 percent of Brown County Schools students receive free or reduced-price lunches.
Now, it is based on the number of students enrolled in SNAP and TANF benefits (food stamps) and the number of students placed in foster homes in the county.
“Rural communities do not access those benefits as much as urban communities,” she said.
Hammack said she’s disappointed that enrollment has fallen, but it won’t change the way children will be loved and educated here.
“We’re going to love each 1,782 of these kids to the end of their being and make each day great for them. We’ll be the best small district in the state of Indiana and honestly be able to deliver world-class opportunities to them,” she said.
“We’re trying not to let this get us down, but be very responsible in our response … while not pulling any opportunities away from the kids. … We’re not abandoning that train just because we have less students to educate at this point. It’s not slowing the momentum of the work we’re doing at all.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Security plans changed for BCIS” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Earlier this year, Brown County Schools announced plans on how a $3 million bond would be spent.
Some of those plans have changed as price tags for proposed projects came back higher than expected, Superintendent Laura Hammack said.
Initially, the district was going to use some of the $3 million to remodel entrances at Brown County Intermediate School and Brown County Junior High School.
The remodel at BCIS would have had visitors enter the front doors and be buzzed into a front office to the right instead of the left. The second set of glass doors currently in the building would have become a wall. A classroom would have been turned into a new front office. The current front office would have then been turned into either more office space or a work space.
But that remodel plan has been put on hold. The project was to include HVAC system upgrades, too.
“We scaled back and tried to do another bid to look at a less comprehensive plan. That came back still at a position where we felt like it was just too expensive for us,” Hammack said.
“We were worried that if there were some sort of emergency that happened structurally, with a roof, HVAC or somewhere else, that if we spent all of the capacity of that bond that we just let, that we would be in big trouble. We just felt it was not the responsible thing to move forward with the massive front entryway remodel and HVAC,” Hammack said of the BCIS project.
The BCIS entryway will still be changed somewhat. A secure doorway will be put in with a security camera at the front doors, and a panic button will be installed. Those additions should be made in the next few weeks.
The rest of the bond money will be saved for unexpected problems with buildings.
Since all of the boilers were built at the same time, last year they all started failing, Hammack said.
“We’ve slowly, but surely been needing to replace them all,” she said.
“When bills come in at $30,000, $50,000, $70,000, it’s like, whoa. We need to step back and hold these dollars to address those HVAC needs then look at ways in which we can use future bond issuances to do kind of those comprehensive change outs,” she said.
“We will get there. We have a long-term plan to get there. But at this point, we didn’t feel like it was responsible to go all-in with the front entryway remodel.”
[sc:pullout-text-end][sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Brown County Schools enrollment” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
2007-08: 2,232 students
2008-09: 2,130
2009-10: 2,100
2010-11: 2,035
2011-12: 1,997
2012-13: 1,973
2013-14: 1,967
2014-15: 1,902
2015-16: 1,939
2016-17: 1,800
2017-18: 1,878
2018-19: 1,792
CURRENT SCHOOL ENROLLMENTS
Helmsburg Elementary: 200 (+8 since June 3)
Sprunica Elementary: 242 (-37)
Van Buren Elementary: 191 (+7)
Brown County Intermediate: 264 (-7)
Brown County Junior High: 276 (-18)
Brown County High: 619 (-16)
Source: Brown County Superintendent Laura Hammack
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