The Aurora Public Schools District is expected to unveil feedback next week from parents, staff and community members regarding millions of dollars worth of proposed cuts for the 2011-12 year.
A town hall meeting scheduled for Feb. 28 will include results from district-wide surveys distributed in the past weeks to K-12 teachers and staff, as well as parents and other community members. The surveys seek input on an wide-ranging set of proposed cuts for the coming school year, potential slashes designed to fill a total budget gap of about $25 million for the 2011-12 school year. The total budget for the coming year is about $500 million.
“We will be presenting the survey feedback at the meeting so that people see what we’ve heard from teachers and parents,” said APS spokeswoman Georgia Duran. “The rest of the structure will be pretty fluid.”
The forum will follow Gov. John Hickenlooper’s proposal last week to cut a total of $375 million in state funding for public school funding next year. The budget still must pass through the state Legislature, but APS officials said they’ve planned for historic amounts of budget cuts.
“We began this process last August,” said APS Chief Financial Officer Casey Wardynski. “In looking at the problems the state has, these cuts that the governor has come out with fall within the range of what we planned for.”
The district’s budget proposals include implementing furlough days for a maximum savings of less than $4 million, reducing staff by 2 percent for a total potential savings of $4 million, increasing class size by a maximum of three students for a total savings of more than $11 million, increasing fees for sports and activities and charging students for bust transportation. Wardynski insisted that some of the options spelled out in the survey were more feasible than others.
“Douglas County had done this business of charging for buses ... We don’t view that as a highly probably alternative that we would adopt,” Wardynski said. “The probable options are fairly large dollar items. They’re the things that relate to doing business, which is usually labor,” he added, stating that 80 cents of each dollar spent in the district was tied to labor.
Aurora Education Association President Brenna Isaacs said any cuts related to the union’s collective bargaining agreement would still be subject to negotiation and proper procedure, no matter the results of the survey.
“We still have a collective bargaining process in this district. In our view, the (survey results) doesn’t mean that those are automatically items that are on the chopping block ... if they are items that are normally negotiated,” Isaacs said, adding that AEA recognizes the historic scope of the cuts coming from the state legislature. “We recognize the enormity of these cuts. We don’t have our heads in the sand.”
The district’s town hall meeting is set to start at 6 p.m. on Feb. 28 at the district’s Professional Learning and Conference Center, 15771 E. 1st Ave.
No comments:
Post a Comment