Manatee County Schools Budget Cuts

Aaron Deslatte
Tallahassee Bureau
January 7, 2009
TALLAHASSEE

The impact of the Florida Legislature´s budget-cutting special session will hit hardest in the classroom, as school districts learned Tuesday how deep a cash crunch they would face under plans legislators will formalize today.

Lawmakers are proposing a $491 million cut in school spending. It´s the single biggest cut proposed during the 12-day special session called to slash $2.3 billion from the state´s budget.

The new cuts would cost Orange County schools $23.7 million, on top of the $70 million already cut this year. Seminole would lose an additional $8.7 million; Volusia, $8.5 million; Osceola, $6.9 million; and Lake County, $5.3 million.

So far, lawmakers are proposing overall spending cuts of $900 million -- mainly to health care and education -- or nearly double the total proposed by Gov. Charlie Crist. The governor has urged lawmakers to use more than $1 billion in budget reserves, a call he repeated Tuesday after meeting with economic-development officials.

“What are we supposed to do, sit around and admire that money?” Crist said. “It´s there for a reason, and the reason is to utilize it when we´re in tough times.”

“Here we are.”

House and Senate lawmakers do plan to tap some reserves as well as a fund supported by tobacco settlement proceeds and “trust funds” -- pools of cash dedicated to pay for programs such as affordable housing and land conservation. They will air those plans today.

“Everything´s on the table,” said House education and general-government budget chief David Rivera, R-Miami.

But lawmakers are also facing the likelihood of much deeper budget cuts of $4 billion or more in the regular session this spring, as Florida´s economy continues to decline. Revenues fell $100 million short of projections in the past month alone.

Given that, lawmakers said it was unlikely they would go as far as Crist wants them to in drawing on reserves and trust-fund accounts now.

“We´re looking down the barrels of a deepening recession,” said state Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, a former school-district superintendent. “You can only sweep those trust funds one time. You can only spend your savings account once.”

To help the state´s 67 districts cope with the additional cuts in their pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade budgets, lawmakers plan to offer greater flexibility in how they spend their dollars. Money in textbook accounts, for example, could be used to pay for teachers.

“It´s wrong to thin the soup in the school cafeteria and send teachers home in order to keep $100 million in textbook money stuck in a fund somewhere,” Gaetz said.

Locally, school officials said they could absorb the additional cuts -- earlier, Crist had announced a 4 percent holdback in K-12 classroom spending -- and limp through this year. But they said next school year will be an entirely different story.

This year, the Orange County school district took several drastic measures, including changing its middle- and high-school start times and shedding more than 600 teaching positions.

Next year, the district is bracing for $100 million more in lost revenue, and that does not include potential reductions in property-tax dollars caused by plummeting land and home values.

“This year was painful, but we dealt with it all along. Next year will be all-new, painful, grueling cuts,” said Scott Howat, the school district´s lobbyist.

Seminole County school officials said the proposed new cuts aren´t as large as they anticipated. The district had braced for up to $17 million -- about twice as much as the Legislature is proposing.

“It´s bad, but not as bad as we thought,” said Darvin Boothe, lobbyist for the district.

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