Friday, January 7, 2011

$3.07M Increase (5.09%) Superintendent's Budget Recommendation Part I - Certified Salaries

During last night's BOE Business meeting, Dr. Florio presented his 2011-2012 Budget Recommendation of $63,448,229 or an increase over the current 2010-2011 Budget ($60,377,875) of $3,070,424. This represents a 5.09% requested increase...The full presentation from last night can be viewed here. This post will be the first in a series that will break down the budget into more detail and, hopefully, will foster a constructive dialogue throughout the budget process.



Part I breaks down the accounts representing the 5.09% increase:
The account summary above is from the presentation last night. However, it doesn't show the true picture as it doesn't include the $540,000 one-time Federal Teacher Stimulus grant that will be used in 2011-2012. Without the grant, the increase would be $3,610,424 or 6% increase. This grant will expire, be used up, at the end of the 2011-2012 school year. Where appropriate, I'll highlight the impacts grants have on our finance throughout the series.

Let's break down the summary above into the it's corresponding budget accounts taken from BM-1 in the 2011-2012 Budget Workbook:



Certified Salaries:
This line item increase of $1,237,053 includes:
  • $120,099 in Administrative Salaries (Administration, Directors/Supervisors/Principals/Asst Principals)
    • $90,793 of which is due to the loss off Federial Stimulus Funding under the ARRA program. A portion of the Director of Pupil Services salary was paid under this grant in 2009/10 and 2010/11.
  • $1,083,524 in Teacher's contracted salary increases.
  • $11,760 in Homebound Teachers
  • $21,670 for Student Activities & Adult Education
    • Salaries for sports coaches and faculty advisors for extra-curricular activities at the High School and Middle School are included here. The Education Association of Cheshire contract calls for a 2.4% increase in these stipends.
In Part II, we'll break down the Non-Certified salaries & Employee Benefits.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the information Tony!

Anonymous said...

Wow, this is great, Tony. I didn't go to the meeting last night b/c I didn't feel good..watched it on TV but this is nice to have here on the blog to refer back to.

Anonymous said...

I attended the meetings on Tuesday and was shocked and dismayed by the proposals that Florio made about what potential cuts might due to our schools. One of the things I noticed was that in all of Dr. Florio's suggestions never was administrative positions or central office positions identified as areas that could be cut. These areas of reduction would have far less impact on students than removing teachers from classrooms.

Looking through the districts website I have several proposals.
Historically, at times of even higher enrollment, Norton and Doolittle have not had or shared an assistant principal. Since enrollment is down and projected to keep going down especially at the elementary level, this is one position that could be eliminated without impact on impact on student learning.

Secondly, while a Curriculum Coordinator is nice to have at times prosperity, this another position that could be eliminated at these "difficult" times without impacting students classroom experiences. The assistant superintendent can oversee curriculum again. This could be a large savings.

Please consider these suggestions.
Thanks.

Tony Perugini said...

11:47, thank for your suggestions. I will research these positions and report back. I'll bring these up during the account review meetings this week too.

I will post a seperate topic on enrollment counts (actual) this school year and actual class sizes this week.

The other train wreck that we won't know about is how ECS funding will be impacted by Hartford. We won't know that unil June. That could be another $1M+ hit to the budget unless Malloy begs, borrows and steals more money to fund ECS. Federal stimulus funds run out on July 1st and Hartford has been using that money to fund it's underfunded portion of ECS.

Anonymous said...

Tony,
Any updates on the previous post about administrative positions? I expected this would be asked at the meeting Tuesday and it wasn't.

Also, looking back around 2000, CHS only had three administrators not 4.

Tony Perugini said...

1:11pm, I did not ask about administrators but will do so tonight. Sorry for the oversight.