2010-11 Budget - the Question That Needs to be Asked

Dear Sun Prairie School District...

I read daily about other school districts making massive cuts to their 2010-11 budgets. Most are freezing salaries and even cutting staff, particularly the highly paid administrators. What PERMANENT cuts have you included in your 2010-11 budget proposal?

Answer: $21,000

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING US?

Your $72.3M budget contains exactly 21 THOUSAND dollars of permanent reductions?

Did you slip and fall and hit your collective heads causing amnesia regarding what happened at last year's annual elector's meeting?

The economy is still in the tank and you're still feeding the 800 lb gorilla?

Good luck with that.

Spotlighting the 2010-11 Budget

Tomorrow is the 2nd of 3 public hearings on the school district's 2010-11 budget. This is YOUR chance to speak your piece and comment on the budget. The first budget hearing had a least the appearance of being a little too...well...staged?

So to perhaps whet people's appetites, and to provide data in a format a little different than the one "spun" by district administration, we offer you this:

The net increase in budgeted expenditures of 2010-11 over this past year (2009-10) comes to $3.1 MILLION dollars. That's a figure the district doesn't highlight.

When asked about it, they usually will quickly revert to their defense posturing and blame the increase on "opening the new high school". That is quickly followed by a lot of yada yada about no school district opening a new school under the revenue limit. Hard to buy that when they also tell us that we're one of handful of schools that don't levy up to the revenue limit. Yet another statement that collapses when one looks at actual DPI data instead of taking the district's word for it.

So...$3.1 MILLION dollars in new costs. According to their own budget data, we can only see that $1.5M of those costs --slightly less than 50%---can be attributed to the new high school. So...what's behind the other $1.6M?

We call it "keeping up with the Jones". It's all tied up in food to feed that 800 lb gorilla...which is quickly gonna become a 900 lb gorilla at this rate.

This gorilla needs to be put on a diet...stat!

SP-EYE note: Yes...we don't truly KNOW what some of these costs will be, but the Administrators are "entitled" to 3.8% (just ask them). We even projected low (2.5%) for Local 60 (currently in negotiations) because the screw always gets put to Local 60. The SPEA number comes directly from the contract costing sheet provided with the contract last year. The 5% and 7% increases to health and dental premiums have been stated by the district and applied to what our CURRENT costs for 2009-10 were. We welcome data from the district to refute these numbers. Because basically, we just want to know...where exactly are we spending $3.1 M MORE dollars? Oh...and yes...those of you that do the math will see that the numbers add to 3.19M...not $3.1M. That's because OTHER parts of the budget have slight decreases built into them to accommodate the fat in the gorilla's diet.