Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic 

The move would save the district $525,000 as part of an effort to reduce budget by $1.3 million

The Newberg School District has long been expecting that increases in PERS contributions and other roll-up costs would create a budget shortfall for the 2017-2018 school year, but has been waiting for the latest state funding forecast before drilling down on a proposed budget.

Armed with May's projections district officials presented a budget proposal with $1.3 million in reductions to the school board budget committee at its first meeting May 16.

The most noteworthy cut is the elimination of three school days, which will net the district $525,000, but the proposed budget culls together savings from a handful of other sources in a way that allowed the district to avoid major cuts to its instructional staff.

"My goal was to make these reductions happen with the least amount of impact on students in our system," Superintendent Kym LeBlanc-Esparza said. "As we look at the work that we're doing and the way we've invested over the last five years, we know the dial is moving in the right direction, but we're not there yet. So anything we did to take away services and/or programming for kids is the wrong way to go."

In her budget message, LeBlanc-Esparza explained that Newberg has been well above the state requirements for instructional time, so the district will still be compliant despite losing between 15 to 18 total hours of classroom time from those three days.

The other benefit of cutting school days is that they can easily be added back if the Legislature comes through with more funding after districts finalize their budgets, which must be done by June 30. Refilling positions it cuts now with new hires later in the summer or fall, on the other hand, is by far more difficult.

Considering that personnel costs make up 85 percent or more of school budgets, LeBlanc-Esparza noted the district did have to find ways to reduce staffing costs in addition to cutting school days.

The most direct cuts to staffing will be tied to the elimination of the Great Expectations parent and childhood education program at Newberg High School, which will save $255,000.

The impact of that move will be relatively minimal in terms of K-12 classroom instruction, as the program's primary purpose since it opened in 1990 has been to support and provide parent education to pregnant students, but there are just two pregnant students and three babies currently enrolled.

The program has been a great resource both as a first-rate childcare facility for staff and the general community and a hands-on learning environment for NHS students, but LeBlanc-Esparza said that tough choices had to be made to make the budget work.

"It's a high-quality program," LeBlanc-Esparza said. "It has done great things for our community for a couple of decades now. I look at it like it has served our community really well and the great problem we have in this is that we only have two teen parents now. Back in the day, in 1990 when this opened, there were a lot more teen parents and that's problematic."

A salary audit, however, found that the district will also save even more in staffing costs, $300,000, by giving itself a little less wiggle room when it comes time to make any additional hires in the fall after enrollment numbers and more solid state funding figures are available.

"It's things like when teachers retire and you hire someone new, you see a difference, whether that's $10,000 or $5,000, over 10 or 12 people, there's a savings there," LeBlanc-Esparza said. "If you leave it in your payroll, then that allows you to have a cushion when suddenly we have 36 kids in this grade level and only this one teacher, so we have to hire a teacher after the fact. We have the availability to do that in our budget — you have to leave some of that — but we took a huge amount of that out, which means we're going to have to get this right, but it allowed us to have some savings without cutting teachers or taking any additional days."

The district also expects to save $100,000 by reducing the discretionary budgets by 10 percent at each of its 10 schools, as well as another $150,000 by putting a hiring freeze on some open district office positions.

The budget proposal was also constructed with the expectation that the Legislature will not set aside the $8.4 billion districts and education advocates have been calling for to maintain current K-12 service levels, plus an additional $400 million to fund Measure 98.

District officials are instead basing their calculations on figures of $7.8 billion and just under $300 million.

While the district has determined it needs an operating budget of $53,999,615 in order to maintain current service levels, it is projecting state funding to total $52,600,615, which creates the $1.3 million gap.

The operating budget represents an increase of $3.77 million in "roll up" costs, $1.8 million of which is a result of changes to PERS contributions. It also includes $1.28 million in contractual salary and benefit costs, $125,000 for tuition reimbursement, $25,000 musical instrument repair, $140,000 in cost increases for energy, transportation and utilities, as well as $300,000 for technology.

The final item represents the district's push to complete its Vision 2018 initiative by delivering digital conversion to all secondary students in the district after the last of the most recent bond funds were spent this year.

LeBlanc-Esparza recently met with House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland) and hopes the final figures the Legislature passes will be more generous, but that district has to be conservative with its estimates at this point.

"I'm optimistic that they're doing some work to try to generate more revenue for K-12 education because they understand we simply have to have it for stability in our state," LeBlanc-Esparza said. "But they're not going to get it done in time for us to create the budget."