A long time ago, when I wrote on a different blog, I talked a little bit about Larry Snow. I don’t remember much about Larry Snow anymore, since he’s not extraordinarily relevant, but I do know that his name represented something insidious about District 158. Mostly, that it always seems to be BSing everyone in McCo.
I was meandering through The McHenry County Blog and saw a post about the Huntley District Supervisor calling out Krug via an editorial on the NWHerald. A commenter mentioned Larry Snow, and in a strange twist of serendipity my interest was piqued. If you don’t know who Krug is, don’t know where Huntley is, or have no idea what the NWHerald is, you can probably stop reading now because, well, you just won’t care.
The long and short of it is this: Chris Krug, executive editor, called District 158 on a $7-something million dollar projected deficit for 2011.
Here’s a fair-use snippet with background information linked throughout.
Somehow, District 158, which was running with a $1.8 million surplus in 2007-08, is now projecting that it will be $7.1 million in the hole in 2010. If you go back a bit deeper into the archives, you can find a story we wrote that included information on the district’s past financial situation. In that story, we documented that District 158 had a surplus of $6.3 million in 2004-05….
…And this is the same district that caved in, on a 6-0 vote, to approve massive increases in teacher compensation in the fall of 2008. How big? Well, as the economy was rusting like the door off an old Norge refrigerator and unemployment already had begun to fly off the chart, the District 158 board approved a deal that would give teachers incremental raises of more than 5 percent a year…
…OK, so let’s examine that: The district is going to cut back on books (still a pretty important part of, you know, learning stuff), technology (who needs that when our kids have PlayStation3 at home), crumbling roads (ah, we’re used to those; drive on them all the time) and cleaning the building (kids are so messy, after all), and then try to find a few extra bucks somewhere.
Haven’t heard anything from the teachers just yet.
Well, we won’t hear anything from the teachers. They’ve sucked enough blood for the next 2 years, so we won’t hear from Huntley again until 2011.
In the responding column, the District Supervisor states
Mr. Krug stated that District 158 had projected a $7.1 million deficit for 2011. In fact, a budget with such a deficit was never presented. Instead, the district has worked to reduce spending in certain areas to ensure that we do not spend down our fund balances. To that end, the first draft of the 2011 budget projected a $742,000 operating deficit, which was only a result of a necessary accounting shift needed to correctly report and allocate funds that were received through the federal ARRA program. This funding shift was approved by the Board of Education as a part of the fiscal 2010 budget, approved in September 2009.
Starting on page 359, the scenario suggests a $7+ million deficit. He claims D158 isn’t deficit spending, yet the scenario budget suggests a dip into the reserve fund in excess of $7,000,000. Perhaps he needs to check his math, or his honesty, before posting things that don’t take into account his school board’s own documents.
Why is this important? This is the way McCo is heading. D200 is cutting PreK services further, D50 is building a school they know won’t be adequate within a decade and property taxes are rising to support the bloated educational costs despite plummeting property values.
But…the children! our teacher’s unions will scream. I have kids. I like my kids. Stop obsessing about the kids and start thinking about economics. George Carlin (RIP) said it best.
And I also know that all you boring single dads and working moms, who think you're such ing heros, aren't gonna like this, but somebody's gotta tell you for your own good: your children are overrated and overvalued, and you've turned them into little cult objects. You have a child fetish, and it's not healthy. And don't give me all that weak, "Well, I love my children."you! Everybody loves their children; it doesn't make you special. John Wayne Gacy loved his children. Yes, he did. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is this constant, mindless yammering in the media, this neurotic fixation that suggests that somehow everything--everything--has to revolve around the lives of children. It's completely out of balance.
Rebecca, maybe you should understand the facts or research before you comment on situations.
The document Cal Skinner posted in his blog was not a budget, but a planning tool for determining when capital project could be scheduled. It was presented for information purposes to the Board of Education a month before the first of five drafts of the 2010-2011 budget was presented for approval. That first budget draft presented to the board didn’t have a $7M deficit.
Yes, Larry Snow was insidious in D158. That’s why the voters got rid of him.
Jack, that’s all well and good. We can discuss the budget, as presented, most recently. However, we can also reference a document from a January 21, 2010 meeting, a full 6 days after Chris Krug wrote his article. In this addendum document, the school board addresses the deficit in the proposed FY2011 budget. The document can be viewed here.
The addendum corrects a “cell reference error,” which resulted in the FY2011 budget (presented to the BoE on January 7, 2010 – approximate starting page 230) containing a deficit in excess of $740,000. With the corrected “cell reference,” the budget now carries a surplus in excess of $705,000, assuming correct property tax revenues. The deficit document was available to Chris Krug prior to writing his column and is, ostensibly, how he garnered information on the budget cuts. The linked document contains information on various cuts, including text books.
The BoE should, ideally, have contacted Krug for a correction, citing the “cell reference error” as stated in the addendum. However, it instead entered a public forum and presented an argument that does not agree with its internal documents. According to the column writer, this deficit was the result of a “necessary accounting shift,” yet, according to the internal document, it was the result of a “cell reference error” due to improperly considered tax revenue. In this case, it cannot be both.
I would like to take this moment to remind you that the purpose of this post is not, in fact, to comment on the finalized budget of Consolidated School District 158. It is to address the lies presented in a public forum from a district representative. BoE documents did, in fact, reflect a potential $7.1 million dollar deficit. Whether it is a “working document” or not, this document was presented to the Board as a “scenario,” suggesting, if not implying, this was an expected outcome for the FY.