School budgets changing

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

Poudre School District officials allayed many fears on Feb. 20 when they released almost-final budget projections for each school in the district.

For months there have been rumors of northern schools facing deep cuts and south Fort Collins schools benefiting financially from more growth. The culprit was a new formula called student-based budgeting, which changes the way the district splits up its general fund revenue to educate children.

"I was pleasantly surprised and pleased," said Brenda Rader-Mross, whose daughters attend Wellington Junior High and Poudre High School. "The early numbers did indicate we were going to take severe hits in the north. We're in a place now where I do think the model is going to work."

School principals will receive their final budget allocations on March 9 based on the distribution of some 22,000 students.

Jim Sarchet, assistant superintendent of business services, explained that total enrollment in Poudre School District has been flat the past five years and will remain so in the foreseeable future. For the last 15 years, PSD has used a staffing model that worked with consistent growth in student numbers, but that method is not sustainable, nor is it flexible, he said.

The theory of student-based budgeting is to allocate funds according to the needs of each student enrolled in a school. Each student allocation starts with $3,276. From there, additional dollars are added based on factors such as English language learners, gifted and talented, income qualification for free lunch, size of the school and geographic location. With the geographic factor, each student in the mountain schools of Stove Prairie, Livermore and Red Feather Lakes is allocated an additional $2,637.

"I was very concerned about how my little schools were going to be treated," said Bob Kulovany, principal for the mountain schools.

To ease the transition, PSD has established a safety net so that no school will lose more than 20 percent of its current budget. To offset that cost, no school will gain more than 80 percent.

"This guarantees that every school in the district gets funding," said Dierdre Cook, principal at Fossil Ridge High School. Fossil Ridge is PSD's newest and smallest high school.

"With this formula, the money does follow the students," Kulovany said. If state funding for schools goes up or down, the new model "can accommodate changes very nimbly," he added.

Altogether, the new funding formula spends $83 million of the district's $170 million general fund budget. The remaining $87 million pays for items such as special education, athletics, transportation, textbooks, custodial services and alternative programs like Centennial High School.

Michael Martin, assistant principal for the district's smallest junior high school in Wellington, said he also feared a financial bind. Now it appears the school budget will be about the same. "We've been assured the district will tweak the model so small schools can be an attractive option for kids," he said.

At Eyestone Elementary School in Wellington, Principal David Sobson is looking at a lot of change. A couple hundred students will be moving to the new Rice Elementary School this fall.

With 750 students this year, Eyestone receives about $700 per student less than the district average under the old staffing formula, he said. Preston, the largest junior high, in south Fort Collins has a similar situation, Sobson noted.

"I would say this is going to be a good thing for Eyestone next year and years to come," he said.

"We will continue to study how this moves forward," said Superintendent Jerry Wilson. "We're going slow before we go fast. We want to make sure we're doing it right."