Ohio schools’ woes shown through one district’s cuts

DAN SEWELL

Asso­ci­ated Press

WEST CHESTER — One by one, the par­ents of Lakota Schools came down the audi­to­rium steps to stand before the micro­phone. Some were dressed in busi­ness attire; shirt-and-tie, sport coats, dresses. Oth­ers were casual, in jeans and T-shirts.

All were unhappy about what is hap­pen­ing in one of Ohio’s highest-rated school dis­tricts, as it deals with tough bud­get pres­sures that schools across the state are grap­pling with.

“We are cut­ting every student’s abil­ity to achieve his full poten­tial,” said long­time res­i­dent John Trygier.

“I wanted them to have the Lakota edu­ca­tion I had,” said Lisa Bab­cock, a mother of five. “Are you going to drive all the par­ents out of the school district?”

Sit­ting around a table at the front and fac­ing an audi­ence of hun­dreds on a Mon­day night in this north­ern Cincin­nati sub­urb, school admin­is­tra­tors and board mem­bers on the ver­bal fir­ing line weren’t happy, either.

“We have no choice,” Karen Man­tia, the super­in­ten­dent, said repeatedly.

School offi­cials had just laid out mea­sures to slash $10.5 mil­lion, more than 6 per­cent, from the district’s bud­get. That’s 141 lost jobs, most of them teach­ers, one fewer class period a day, less instruc­tional time and less art, music and phys­i­cal education.

Such scenes are play­ing out around Ohio.

“It’s becom­ing more and more com­mon across the state, and across all types of dis­tricts, even dis­tricts with gen­er­ally high lev­els of per­for­mance,” said Damon Asbury, leg­isla­tive direc­tor for the Ohio School Boards association.

A sur­vey by the research group Pol­icy Mat­ters Ohio con­cluded that two of every three dis­tricts face short­falls. From the biggest such as Cleve­land and Cincin­nati, to small ones such as Water­loo in in north­east Ohio and Mon­roe in south­west Ohio, school boards are hack­ing at their 2012–13 bud­gets, with hun­dreds of jobs already slated for elimination.

The state’s school fund­ing for­mula, reliant on prop­erty taxes and will­ing­ness of vot­ers to approve levies, was declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­ally inequitable in 1997 by the Ohio Supreme Court. New approaches offered since by gov­er­nors and leg­is­la­tors have fallen by the way­side. Gov. John Kasich has indi­cated he will tackle the con­tentious issue in the next year

While among issues with the for­mula is the gap in prop­erty val­ues between wealthy and poor dis­tricts, the reces­sion hit some sub­ur­ban dis­tricts par­tic­u­larly hard. After years of double-digit enroll­ment growth that required build­ing new schools and hir­ing more teach­ers, they abruptly ran into what for­mer Lit­tle Miami Schools board pres­i­dent Kym Dun­bar calls “a per­fect storm” — slashed state fund­ing, falling prop­erty val­ues, pinched house­hold bud­gets. That south­west Ohio dis­trict fell into a state-declared fis­cal emer­gency and is try­ing to climb out after finally pass­ing a levy last Novem­ber. Vot­ers had vot­ers rejected eight ear­lier measures.

Lakota Schools, a 68-square-mile dis­trict between Cincin­nati and Mid­dle­town that includes House Speaker John Boehner’s home and AK Steel’s cor­po­rate head­quar­ters, dates to 1957 and saw growth explode from fewer than 7,000 stu­dents three decades ago to some 18,000 today as the once-rural area along Inter­state 75 took off.

“We saw val­u­a­tions going up, up, up,” said trea­surer Jenni Logan. “And the same thing hap­pens in reverse.”

School rev­enues from real estate and busi­ness taxes fell more than $10 mil­lion while state fund­ing dropped by $4 mil­lion. Cash reserves, fed­eral stim­u­lus money, pay freezes and cuts that took 82 posi­tions last year bought some time, but vot­ers have rejected three straight bal­lot issues. The lat­est in Novem­ber would have added $145 a year in taxes for every $100,000 of home valuation.

David Humphrey, a long­time bus aide in the dis­trict, said it should have been more cau­tious with its spend­ing years ago, in bet­ter times, “before real­ity set in.”

“Every­one is con­cerned about their own well-being now,” he said, say­ing his property’s value fell $11,000 in six months. “That kind of wakes you up.”

About a third of Ohio’s 613 pub­lic school dis­tricts had levies in Novem­ber, and state school boards offi­cials say in recent years, it takes dis­tricts, on aver­age, three times to win passage.

Kasich has said vot­ers should demand effi­ciency in schools. The Repub­li­can wants teacher pay focused more on achieve­ment than seniority.

It’s up to school lead­ers to gen­er­ate sup­port by demon­strat­ing they have their own house in order, said Gary Cates, who rep­re­sented West Chester for more than a decade as a Repub­li­can state legislator.

“The school dis­trict has got to find a way to inspire con­fi­dence in the com­mu­nity if they want peo­ple to open their pock­et­books,” said Cates, now senior vice chan­cel­lor of the Ohio Board of Regents, which over­sees higher edu­ca­tion. Cates noted that nearby dis­tricts such as Fair­field and Lebanon passed levies last year. “It’s up to the school board to stop blam­ing every­one but themselves.”

Man­tia, in her first year at Lakota after being super­in­ten­dent of Pick­er­ing­ton Schools, a sub­ur­ban Colum­bus dis­trict which also under­went sharp cuts before a levy passed last year, said she under­stands the state’s need to focus on attract­ing busi­nesses and stim­u­lat­ing Ohio’s slug­gish econ­omy. But she sees edu­ca­tion as an impor­tant force for eco­nomic vitality.

“There are some things that you can’t yield on, and edu­cat­ing our chil­dren is one of them,” she said.

It seems the district’s rapid growth has become a lia­bil­ity, said James Miller, father of twins at Lakota West High. His son plays foot­ball, his daughter’s a cheer­leader, and they are also are involved in other activ­i­ties — cost­ing him $550 each, per sport.

“It’s almost like you pay all these fees, and then they’re always try­ing to get more money,” Miller said.

Jenny Van De Eyn­den, mother of a senior and eighth-grader active in band and music pro­grams, doesn’t like fine arts cutbacks.

“The qual­ity of edu­ca­tion is being com­pro­mised,” she said. “It cuts into what makes Lakota Lakota.”

Ben Dib­ble, board pres­i­dent, assured par­ents the dis­trict con­tin­ues to seek ways to reduce costs, such as sav­ing thou­sands with improved energy effi­ciency and com­bin­ing bus­ing routes.

“We are try­ing to be eco­nom­i­cally respon­si­ble and only spend­ing what we actu­ally know is com­ing in rev­enue,” Dib­ble said.

Even with the unpop­u­lar cuts, Lakota’s bud­get fore­casts show dark clouds ahead. With­out a new levy, it will face a $14.1 mil­lion deficit within three years.

Posted by AP News on Apr 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.