Like many schools districts across Colorado, Durango School District 9-R is bracing for budget cuts next year.
The amount of money districts receive from the state is invariably tied to the number of students they serve. And although Durango schools’ pupil count is declining, the drop is not as drastic as state statistics released in mid-January might indicate.
Still, district leaders and officials say they are concerned that Durango schools could be shorted over $1 million next year – atop the estimated $62 million that 9-R has been shorted since the Colorado General Assembly introduced the Budget Stabilization factor in 2009.
“I am not a person to just sit by and let this happen,” Superintendent Karen Cheser said.
According to annual statistics released by the Colorado Department of Education, enrollment at Durango schools dropped a whopping 15% from last year – a decrease of 775 students.
However, all but 23 of those students were part of Colorado Connections Academy, a virtual statewide public school program for which the district received only 3% of the full per-pupil allocation. The district stopped participating in the program this year as a cost-saving measure, Cheser said.
Typically, Colorado uses a five-year enrollment average to calculate the number of students a district serves. In areas where enrollment drops significantly and suddenly, this insulates districts from sharp corresponding budget cuts.
But this year, Gov. Jared Polis has proposed using a one-year student count as a money-saving mechanism to address an estimated $750 million budget shortfall. Over the next several years, the state will roll out a new school funding formula that is expected to benefit rural districts.
9-R would be one of 111 districts to see cuts under the proposed counting method. Although Durango schools would not lose funding for 775 individual students, 9-R could still lose funding for about 50 full students, and in the worst-case scenario, that could cost the district $1.2 million, according to the state’s projections.
Cheser is optimistic that the worst-case scenario won’t come to bear.
“I just can’t imagine that the Legislature will allow that budget to happen without some modifications,” she said, noting that both Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, and Rep. Katie Stewart, D-Durango, who sits on the 9-R Board of Education, are committed to fully funding education.
Still, she said, the district is concerned.
“We’re not adequately funding public education, and that hurts students and it hurts the highest-risk students,” said 9-R Board of Education Vice President Erika Brown. “I think Colorado just needs to fundamentally change how it approaches this.”
Cheser said that in response to the budgetary squeeze, the district is looking for cost-savings by bringing more work, such as landscaping and transportation, in-house.
“The plan would be to first go through all of our departments (and) see where we can cut,” she said. “Are there some capital projects that we had on the list that we were going to do that we just need to defer? Are there ways we can be more efficient?”
The district has already hired more bus drivers to save money by not hiring expensive charter buses.
But some effects could trickle down to students.
The district pays substitute teachers to cover when full-time staff members attend trainings. That might be on the chopping block, Cheser said, although it would be low on the list of cost-saving measures the district would pursue.
The district plans to avoid layoffs, but may tinker with staffing formulas to allow class sizes to grow in the short-term and take advantage of vacancy savings.
“(It) would be the last resort to do anything that impacted classrooms, and hopefully whatever we did do would just be a temporary fix until we can get some change,” Cheser said.
The superintendent says she is determined to insulate the district from the most dramatic cuts and will testify to lawmakers to the end.
“We’re already 49th in the country in funding for schools,” Cheser said. “And if you continue to make it unreasonable for us to be able to give high-quality education because we can’t pay teachers what they should be making, and we can’t give them the resources and tools, and we have to increase class sizes, that will impact the future of our state.”
Part of the state’s problem, she notes, is a $350 million unfunded mandate passed by voters in November to recruit and retain law enforcement officers.
Board Vice President Brown also blames the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, known as TABOR.
“Colorado has uniquely self-imposed limits on spending, and it’s frustrating because we’re a wealthy state with a really strong economy, and we’ve made it impossible to make the pot bigger and fund education and other important things,” she said.
All of these possibilities – changing the method of a district’s student population, the budget stabilization factor, or any other mechanism to fill a hole in the state budget – equate to the same thing.
“It’s still a cut for us,” Brown said. “So, maybe it doesn’t make sense to average five years (of enrollment); fine use the current year, but just make sure that we’re whole.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com