School cuts could kill state funds

Written by Byron Hensley | 14 July 2010

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Coffee County’s various departments have been asked to reduce their budget requests for the 2010-11 fiscal year by 2.5 percent from their 2009-10 requests. But Coffee County Schools won’t be able to do that without jeopardizing state funding, school board members said. Some 60 percent of funding for Coffee Schools comes from the State of Tennessee in the form of the Basic Educational Package (BEP), a supplement the state provides to local school districts each year. To get its share of BEP money, the local community must show “Maintenance of Effort” in school funding, which means that the amount of money local government appropriates for education can’t go be reduced from the previous year.
But county commissioners on the commission’s budget & finance committee are currently dealing with a projected $1.9 million shortfall in revenues for general government services, and don‘t believe the commission has the stomach for any property tax increases in the recession environment.
“Deerfield is in jeopardy,” School Board Member Esther Simms said, referring to the new elementary school on the Woodbury Highway which is scheduled to open in August. The cost of opening Deerfield accounts for roughly half of the $1.2 million in new funding the board will likely be requesting from the commission this year. Not opening Deerfield this year may be the only way to avoid a tax increase, she said.
“There’s not a lot of options, except for a wheel tax, or an increase in property tax,” board chairman Jimmy Sain said. “Neither option is going to be very popular.”
“What’s going to be even less popular is not opening that school,” board member Ricky Milburn said.
There are few options for cost cutting within the school system, Schools Director Kenny Casteel said.
The system’s biggest cost is personnel, and much of the personnel needs are mandated by the state, including student-teacher ratio. The system is also below standards in terms of non-teaching personnel such as nurses and custodians, he said.
“As long as the economy is the way it is, some of those laws may have to be changed,” Simms said. “How can we raise taxes when people don’t have jobs?”
Milburn said the county would be in better financial straits now if it had implemented mild tax increases during better economic times.
“This is what happens when you don’t have tax increases in eight years,” he said. “I want my grandkids to be able to go to school, and for it to be something we can be proud of. To go backwards is just not acceptable. I think we’re looking at a property tax increase whether we want to or not.”