District 833 Plans Cuts to Busing Services While Increasing the District's Travel Budget

Back in March, District 833 made a preliminary vote on next year's budget - "saving" approximately $2 million by voting to eliminate 22 teacher and four administrative support positions and increasing middle/high school student walking distances by a half mile each.  

The walking distance increases are supposed to save $169,000 - by no means a small amount of money, but in the grand scheme of things, was it the only choice our district had as a place to cut budget expenses?  In the Service Level Survey, keeping busing at current levels was second only to keeping teacher ratios at current levels - both items of which the district decided to cut, even though they both had the most community support.  

It is important to keep expenses low in any organization, however, since the community is repeatedly told that the number one focus of the school district is on the kids, one would believe that the board and administration would look to other places to cut before cutting busing services and teachers, right?  Like perhaps in areas like out-of-state travel expenses?  Surely, with the amount of technology the district boasts of having, out-of-state travel would be unnecessary - considering all the online education opportunities and the availability of programs like Skype and GoToMeeting, one would believe that in order to save taxpayer money and to make sure that all available resources would actually be going to benefit students, out-of-state travel by district employees would be discouraged.  

According to information received from the district, that isn't the case.  When the district leadership is voting to cut busing by increasing walking distances for middle and high school students to save $169,000, they have been increasing the district's travel expense budget by almost $200,000 over last year's budget and over what they actually have the funding with which to pay for travel: Resulting in District 833 having a total travel expense budget of $739,130.00 for this year (see the above attachments). 

The school board will meet tonight, June 6, 2013 at 6pm, to have the "first reading of the proposed 2013-2014 budget." If you believe that they have more work to do on the proposed budget, please contact the board members and/or plan to attend tonight's meeting to hear the discussion on the proposed budget. Even though the State of Minnesota has increased the funding to the school district, it would seem as though the original budget on which was voted back in March, will remain the same - the cuts to staffing and increased walking distances will not change.  

The Board and Administration will be doing a final vote on the budget at the next meeting on June 20, 2013.  

Updated June 6, 2013 5:58pm