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The Daily Tar Heel

School district expects layoffs

Budget likely to shrink by $2 million

Another round of layoffs is expected at Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools due to the second significant cut to the district’s budget in two years.

District administrators expect its budget to shrink by several million dollars next school year, Superintendent Neil Pedersen said.

“It is reasonable to assume we will have to make some reductions in positions,” Pedersen said. Staff salaries make up nearly 85 percent of the district’s budget, he said, giving them few other ways to reduce the budget.

He anticipates a $2 million cut to the current budget, which was already downsized $3 million last year.

Pedersen said last year’s cuts started in areas not directly related to educating students. But the extent of the cuts made it necessary to reduce personnel costs by reducing the number of teachers and increasing class sizes, he said.

“This is almost certainly going to mean reductions which will impact students,” School Board Chairman Mike Kelley said.

Both Pedersen and Kelley noted that many ideas from last year’s budget discussion will likely come up again, including cuts to health and electives programs.

“We will look at possibilities that were brought up last year, some of which we did not have to implement,” Pedersen said. “I expect a good number of those will go into effect.”

For the second straight year, the district will not receive money from the state for new textbooks. The decrease in state funding is projected to total $1.1 million.

“We have a global financial — for lack of a better word — mess, and that deficit trickles down from global to the state and down to schools,” Chapel Hill High School Principal Jesse Dingle said.

Several factors will force the district to pay an additional $1.2 million next year, Pedersen said, including rising utility costs and a decreased state contribution for health care and retirement benefits.

“We’ve basically been absorbing an inflationary increase,” Pedersen said, “which equals a reduction in buying power.”

Small increases in district revenue are expected to keep the shortfall below $2 million, between 1 percent and 2 percent of the total budget.

School administrators said they were not surprised by the cuts.

“We had been reading and hearing all along that this year there would be more cutbacks,” McDougle Middle School Principal Debra Scott said.

The school board will discuss the budget at its planning conference in February and send an approved version to the Orange County Board of Commissioners, who will determine the county’s contribution over the summer.

“This is my 18th year as superintendent,” Pedersen said, “and this is the first year we’ve received less money from the county commissioners than the year before.”

The other half of funding will come from the state.

The school district’s total budget is usually between $110 million and $120 million, Kelley said.

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.

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