Taking a Look at the Figures Presented

All the budgets presented total $114.6M.  We are sure we attended each public budget meeting and obtained every budget presented.  It is unclear to us why Mr. Olivo presented an initial budget figure of $115.6 million at the March 10th meeting.  You can see the Times-Herald Record article for more specifics.

We totaled up all the budgets presented.  You can examine those totals here.  What is unclear to us is where the difference of $1 million is.  The way we understand the process to work is as follows.

• The administration has each department/section prepare their budget request.
• The administration reviews and works with the department to form an initial request to the BOE.
• The department presents their budget request in a public meeting to the BOE.
• When all budgets have been presented the superintendent makes his initial recommendation.  This recommendation may be higher or lower than the totals presented by the departments.  That accounts for the superintendent going back to each or specific departments and telling them to increase or decrease their request by a certain amount or range.

If our understanding of the process is not correct we hope someone can write to us and explain it more clearly.  We want to inform everyone how this process works since many of you have expressed exasperation about the budget process being too complex.

So as we understand it, $1 million was cut before it was ever presented.  The $2.1 million bus purchase was included in the Transportation budget but will be a separate bond issue.  That leaves about $200,000 to be cut from the $28 million non-personnel budgets.  We feel that these non-personnel budgets, the ones that provide the "things" that are used to educate our children, are bare-bones budgets as presented.  There is very little fat in them except things like the Professional Dues & Publications, Conferences & Meetings, and Travel Allowances.  Those are areas which, if cut, would NOT affect our children like this year's (and three years ago) austerity budget did.

Send mail to webmaster@ctmw.org with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 10/21/07