Budget holes discussed at DCSD worksession
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
With budget season in full swing, the Darlington County Board of Education met for a work session May 3 to discuss the 2018-2019 district budget as well as other items that have been brought before the board in recent months.
Dr. Tim Newman, who will assume the role of district superintendent June 1, pending approval from the board at their May meeting, discussed with boardmembers a district organizational chart and how he has been approaching a review of it.
“One of the things I mentioned in my interview process was that I wanted to make sure that I get to talk with you all, as a board, and to meet and talk individually with the district office staff…and the principals as well and try to find out exactly what the needs are in the district and how we can meet those needs better,” Newman said. “This is a step in the process, to see how we have things organized and then what we can do going forward to make things more cohesive and really meet the needs of our students in the best possible way.”
Newman said that he wanted to talk with the board about what he was doing so that no false information circulated around the district.
“We have been going through this process and I am continuing to go through the process; I still have more principals to sit down and talk with one-on-one but I’m starting to get a consensus of some things that are needs that we’re looking at,” Newman said.
“Of course most importantly, since we are talking about budgets, is how to do that within the constraints that we already have. I will have some recommendations going forward.
Dr. Boyd has been incredibly instrumental in this process as well, with the historical piece that’s there and also his knowledge of some of the roles as well.”
Renee Douglas, Chief Financial Officer for the district, spoke to the board about the status of their annual bond issuance.
“The five million dollar bond from last year was paid off on Monday; a new one will be issued in August,” Douglas said. “A $2.6 million dollar capital lease will be issued pending IT’s technology needs, as soon as we sit down and talk with her (Diane Sigmon). That is one of the outstanding items in the budget that we haven’t quite tied down. We are continuing to review our capital projects list and our maintenance projects. We identified at the last meeting…about $200,000 in the budget that we repurposed for maintenance needs. We (also) asked the board to give us $500,000 out of the fund balance. Ervin (McElveen the district’s director of operations) and his crew have started on those projects.”
Douglas said that she and the district’s finance consultant, John Thames, have been working to correct items in the budget that were missing or under-budgeted for.
“We found a lot of things that needed to be updated in the current budget,” Douglas said. “All these items are gong to have an affect on the budget coming up to where we are right now, This year, there are several items that were under-budgeted so we’ve got actual cost for next year and we’ve made sure that we’ve got them fully budgeted for next year.”
Dr. Newman also talked with board members about changing to block scheduling, a conversation they have been having themselves even before he was hired.
“(With block scheduling) there are a lot more options for kids,” Newman said. “With kids, when you look at the sheer number of credits that they can accumulate on a block schedule versus a traditional schedule, they can get more credits. Opportunities, whether it be for dual-credit, internships, work-based experiences, the DCIT programs, when you have block you have a lot more time for kids to travel.”
Newman said that finances would be a determining factor in the change.
“I talked with our finance folks and I would not ‘Pass Go’ if there was not money to do it,” Newman said. “I went to the finance folks early in the budget process and at that time we had pealed back about two or three layers of the onion and it looked pretty good. I talked with principals and we started looking at numbers. When I originally started having conversations about block, it was going to be a cost of about $2 million, recurring. That is a lot of money. When I had the initial meeting with the principals I told them to talk to me about the costs associated. After that meeting, the cost was down to about $1 million. We started having more collective conversations…and came down to about $500,000. When we peeled the last layer back on the budget and we saw that it wasn’t going to look so good, we had another conversation with principals and we are down to about $275,000 to initiate block scheduling.”
All items discussed were done so simply as information received. Board members cannot make any voting decision in work sessions so any items that will require a vote will need to be added to a regular meeting’s agenda.
