BISD pledges balanced budget, no layoffs
The Brownsville Independent School District’s interim chief financial officer on Thursday presented the broad outlines of a 2011-2012 budget that interim Superintendent Carl Montoya said will be balanced, not dip into fund balance, not result in any layoffs and leave the district’s effective tax rate unchanged.
Interim CFO Ismael Garcia presented a “near final draft” of next year’s budget at the final budget committee meeting Thursday before a special meeting next week of the BISD Board of Trustees to adopt next year’s budget. BISD’s fiscal year begins July 1.
At the beginning of Thursday’s meeting, Montoya said his administration is taking a team approach to finalizing the budget. He said he, Garcia and Human Resources director Sylvia Atkinson met on Monday with BISD principals and top members of the administration. The main goal: protect classroom instruc-tion.
Montoya said officials had addressed three of eight areas where teachers, administrators and others had expressed concern that budget cuts were being proposed unnecessarily. He said the group would address the remaining five in coming days.
Garcia said he and his staff were able to find ways to eliminate the need for cutting eight work days for certified and eight days for classified employees — a savings if instituted of $1.84 million for certified and $311,352 for classified employees.
In addition, they were able to put back in academic team teaching at the middle-school level, which would have saved $1.3 million.
Part of the savings that made it possible to put those funds back had to do with using $8.79 million in federal job funds for operating expenses, Garcia said.
He said the budget process up until his and Montoya’s appointments had tended to look at the various funds — the one for local maintenance, for example — in isolation.
“We never really looked at the whole picture,” he said. “They’re all interrelated.”
One of Montoya’s first moves when he was appointed interim superintendent was to place CFO Tony Fuller on administrative leave with pay and appoint Garcia the acting CFO. Garcia is the district’s admin-istrator of Special Programs but previously was CFO with the Raymondville school district.
Garcia presented a summary of proposed budget savings that show a starting deficit of nearly $36 mil-lion. From that figure, the sixth draft of next year’s budget shows $18.24 million in proposed savings and $17.67 million in other revenue to offset the deficit.
BISD and school districts across the state are having to cut their budgets because of a well-publicized state revenue shortfall. It appears likely that public education in Texas will receive about $4 billion less during the next biennium than in the current budget. The latest estimates peg BISD’s share of the short-fall at $17.9 million for the 2011-2012 school year, according to information Garcia provided at the meet-ing.
The Legislature is meeting in special session in Austin to hammer out the state’s biennial budget, a task it was unable to complete during its regular session. BISD’s current budget of just under $505 million includes almost $326 million in state funds.
glong@brownsvilleherald.com
