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The Northwest Allen County Schools board approved slashing more than $580,000 from the district’s budget Monday but managed to avoid laying anybody off by absorbing the cuts through attrition.
The cuts include eliminating 12 positions, including custodians, classroom teachers, administrators and the librarian at Carroll High School, and getting rid of summer-school programs for middle and high schoolers and the driver’s education program. The district will add three positions, including a science teacher at Carroll, a fifth-grade teacher at Oak View Elementary School and an office assistant at Carroll.
The cuts total $700,603, but with the added positions, the net cut from the 2009-10 school year budget will be $582,603.
“Unfortunately, we are in the budget-cut mode like (almost) every other school district in Indiana,” Superintendent Steve Yager said.
Four full-time and two part-time custodian positions will be eliminated from the district’s natatorium and elementary schools, and the rest of the staff will split their time to pick up the slack. One teaching position will be eliminated from Eel River Elementary School, which won’t open in August, so nobody has been hired.
A fifth-grade teaching position will be slashed from Arcola Elementary School, but the person currently in that spot will be placed in another opening in the district, said Bill Mallers, business manager. A counseling position at Arcola will be paid for with federal stimulus money, leaving that money available in the general fund budget.
The district also will eliminate the after-school program at the two middle schools, where teachers are paid to help struggling students. Summer school will be gone at the middle and high school level, although high schoolers will still be able to take credit-recovery courses over the summer in English and math.
The assistant athletic director position at Carroll and a teaching position at the Youth Services Center will be cut, but those employees will be placed elsewhere in the district, Mallers said. An assistant principal position at Carroll also was eliminated, and the person currently filling it was recently hired as the principal of Perry Hill Elementary School.
Driver’s education will be eliminated, and the district will save money by not paying a Carroll assistant principal to administer the course.
The most controversial cut was eliminating the librarian position at Carroll through a retirement. Board member Paul Sloffer wanted to remove the cut from the list because he said he wanted to get more information before he voted. Board members Mary Wysong, Ron Felger and Donald Duff voted against that motion and it failed.
Sloffer then wanted to vote on the librarian position separate from the rest of the cuts.
“You’re going to get the same numbers,” said Duff, board president.
“I don’t care,” Sloffer said. “I want to vote against it.”
Sloffer and board member Nick Schortgen voted to retain the position, and the remaining three members voted to cut it.
