The York County School Board will meet Monday at a work session, which will be their first meeting in the wake of the Board of Supervisors decision to allocate the school division with $1.8 million less than the school board originally requested.
The supervisors concluded their budget process Thursday with a 5-0 vote to raise the real estate tax rate by 1 cent instead of the 2.3 cents proposed by County Administrator James McReynolds. The 2.3-cent rate would have generated $2.3 million in additional revenue for the schools as opposed to the $1.17 million in additional revenues allocated under the budget plan that was approved Thursday.
The vote came after over a month of discussion among the supervisors that focused on the proposed 2.3-cent increase. The 1-cent increase was suggested Tuesday by Supervisor Thomas Shepperd.
The total operating budget of the school division has followed a U shape since 2009, when the budget was $124.5 million. That amount declined to $115 million in 2011, but has since risen to $120.5 million in the 2013 budget. The 2.3-cent proposal would have allocated $124.3 million for the schools.
The reduction in funding from the county comes at a time when the school division is facing ballooning healthcare costs and declining money from the state and federal government. Revenue from the state has declined from $66 million in 2009 to about $56.2 million in 2013. The schools are also looking at losing more than $250,000 from sequestration.
Dennis Jarrett, the chief financial officer for the school division, said more than $9 million of increased cost from 2009 has come in the form of health insurance costs, employer retirement contributions and state and federally mandated special education services.
Healthcare costs have climbed $2.6 million for the upcoming year due in part to another year of an above average number of claims from people on the school division’s plan. The budget the school division passed in March already called for the reduction of 14 positions due to an enrollment decline of 120 students. The positions include five teachers, two paraeducators and materials, which will save around $500,000 altogether. Another $1.2 million in savings was found in positions lost to attrition. Cutting one warehouse position and three custodians will save the division $108,300.
The 14 eliminated jobs bring the total number of eliminated jobs in the school division to 124 in recent years. Those positions include school board staff, maintenance department staff, support positions in the schools like clerical positions, teachers, para-educators and a guidance counselor.
The difference between the full $2.9 million asked for by the school division and the $2.3 million in McReynolds’ proposal was $600,000 to offset the cost of higher payroll taxes on mandatory employee contributions to the Virginia Retirement System. Changes to the Virginia Retirement System gave municipalities and school divisions the option of having employees contribute 5 percent of their salaries to the retirement system with a corresponding raise or to break the increase in contributions and the corresponding raises up over several years.
The school division wanted to take care of the remaining 4 percent after going with the 1 percent option last year, though it is unclear what will happen following the approved budget.
A central tenant in discussions among the supervisors and among members of the school board has been a 2 percent increase in pay for both county employees and school division employees. The county’s budget includes that increase for county employees, though with the reduction in funding to the school division, it’s uncertain in what the school board will do in regard to the raise as well as other components of the operating budget.
The total cost of the increase for the school division is about $1.5 million, Jarrett saidn. The state will fund around $695,000 of that increase, while the school division must fund the remaining $805,000.
