Seven CC teaching jobs face elimination in budget crunch

Charles City school officials are faced with eliminating seven teaching positions and four other jobs to balance its $13 million budget for the next school year. And county School Board members are far from happy about the prospect.

Board members learned of the schools’ predicament during a work session last Thursday night. School Superintendent Janet Crawley presented the board with three options for trimming personnel.

All three, however, involve seven teaching posts — three at the elementary school and two at both the middle and high schools — along with one central office administrator, the schools’ food service director, an attendance secretary, and a part-time security worker.

What separates the options is the central office administrator job. A different administrator would be eliminated under each of the three scenarios.

Eliminating jobs is the only recourse schools have to meet the county’s already approved budget for next year, Crawley said. Schools are to receive $6.1 million in county money next year, a million less than the $7.1 million school officials requested and included as part of their budget proposal to county supervisors.

“Our goal was to try to give teachers some sort of raise, but the best we could come up with was 2 percent with a slight health insurance premium increase,” Crawley told board members.

A 4.5 percent across the board pay raise had been penciled into the schools’ original budget proposal.

Crawley said budget adjustments and reducing the proposed pay raise to 2 percent while retaining all jobs chopped the $1 million deficit in half. Eliminating jobs under the proposed options would shave off another $428,000, but still leave schools about $52,000 short of their goal.

Canceling all pay raises would only account for another $50,000, said School Board clerk Curtis Finney, adding, “We can’t avoid eliminating teaching positions.”

Crawley said fuel, utility, and supply expenses are up substantially and expected to increase.

“We might be able to save one [teaching post] by cutting deeper into instructional supplies,” she said.

“This is an exercise in failure,” said disgusted board member Henry Hollimon. “To do this would set the school system back 20 years.”

“Whether we choose option one, two, or three, I personally feel we’re cutting our own throats,” board chairman Barbara Crawley said. “But if we don’t have the money, we’ll have to make do with what we have.”

“We had to claw and scratch to get the school system to where it is today,” Hollimon said. “I’m not willing to say yes to any part of this.”

Board members decided to request a meeting with county supervisors to discuss the schools’ plight. A decision on the proposed options has been postponed until the board’s May 20 meeting.

Steve Fuhrmann, an unsuccessful candidate for School Board in the last election and a frequent critic of the school system, sat in on last week’s session and scolded the board for what he termed “not facing up to responsibilities.”

Fuhrmann said the board has known for several months that budget problems loomed. Meeting further with supervisors would be pointless since the county has no extra money, he added.

“The only magical source would be the [county’s] fund balance,” he said, adding that some of the severely depleted fund money is already being used to balance next year’s overall county budget.

“You don’t have to give everybody a raise; certainly not the already well-paid administrators,” he said. “You need to look at other things rather than futilely going back to the Board of Supervisors.”

In other business last week, board members voted 5-0 to allow Richmond-based National Communications Towers to conduct survey work on the site for a 195-foot monopole cell phone communications tower the company proposes to build on school property.

The site is a 125×125-foot section of wooded land behind the elementary school and southwest of the high school football stadium.

A vote allowing tower construction will come at a later date. School officials could be asking for as much as $1,000 per month rent for the site.