By LAURA HAMMACK, guest columnist
At the first board meeting of the calendar year, school districts must deploy several actions that are statutorily required for consideration.
The board members reorganize offices and establish procedural structures, like meeting times and location.
New this year, Indiana school districts are required to report on the financial condition of the school corporation using fiscal and qualitative indicators developed by the Fiscal and Qualitive Indicators Committee and managed by the Distressed Unit Appeals Board (DUAB).
These eight indicators are presented in a “dashboard” format and are intended to illustrate and evaluate the financial condition of each school corporation. Should the data evidenced for a school corporation prove to be concerning to the DUAB, this body has statutory authority to intervene with proactive interventions. I am pleased to share that the DUAB has not notified Brown County Schools that we are in need in any sort of intervention.
I have served as superintendent of this school district for 3.5 years. I began working in July of 2016 and it took a few months for me to realize that our budget was not in a healthy position. We had been losing cash balances in key funds for several years and our student enrollment was declining by a significant rate. Essentially, our revenues were less than what we were expending. Realizing this, at the beginning of 2017, we began the first round of modifications to our budget.
It was at this time that we prepared a road map with the board to get our budget back on track. With their support, we committed to a foundational principle that while serious budget cuts needed to be made, we were going to make them without issuing any reduction in force (RIF) notices.
In order to do that, we had to look at every function of the school district and look for ways to become more efficient. We adopted a protocol of reduction of staff through attrition, where we didn’t replace positions when individuals left the school district of their own volition.
Key programs in our school corporation were identified as being significant stressors on the budget, so we looked for alternative models with increased efficiencies and outcomes. The most significant transition happened when we abandoned our traditional health insurance plan. With the overhaul of the plan and introduction of the Brown County Health and Wellness Center as an onsite wellness clinic for our school and community, the results were immediate and significant. We just celebrated the second year of zero premium increase for our employees and maintain a reserve in our health insurance fund of $1.5 million.
Had we not deployed — and continue to deploy — the budget modifications that have been realized over the past three years, I expect that the conversation regarding the fiscal and qualitative indicators that I held with the board last week would have been very different.
Conversely, since the board was willing to pull in our budget in ways that weren’t always easy, I was proud to report that our financial condition is strong. We have worked our way to a position where, for the second year in a row, our cash balances in the general and operations funds have increased all while our student enrollment has decreased.
Another foundational principle that I am so grateful to the board for supporting is the need to pay our certified and non-certified staff members at a competitive rate. It took three years to get us to the position this past October to reconstruct the teacher salary ladder to one where long-serving educators were compensated at a rate of pay that had not been afforded to them for years. We still have work to do in regards to compensation for certified and non-certified staff; however, it should be a point of pride for our community that we are on the way.
It is extremely important to understand that we have only been able to provide raises to certified and non-certified staff members for the past four years because of the dollars generated by the referendum. Our school district has been a faithful steward of these dollars and we are vigilant in expending them only for the purpose they were intended. Because of this, we have been able to structure competitive pay scales that attract and retain the highest quality staff. For this, we are deeply grateful to our community.
For a small school district that has been hit hard by declining enrollment and other demographic and policy challenges, we are so proud to report that the financial condition of our school district is strong. We look forward to 2020 realizing more of the same.
Laura Hammack is superintendent of Brown County schools. She can be reached at 812-988-6601 or [email protected].
