Juneau schools face bleak budgets

The Juneau School District revealed Tuesday it will have about $925,000 more than it projected this school year. But officials also presented bleak preliminary budgets for the next two school years that contemplate fewer school buses, fewer teachers and other cuts.

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The district and the teachers' union, the Juneau Education Association, are scheduled to hold mediation sessions Thursday and Friday to try to reach an agreement for this school year's contract.

Teachers have been seeking a 2 percent increase in the rates on their salary schedule, cumulatively worth about $335,000, they have said. Teachers also want the district to pay more toward health insurance premiums, the cost of which has gone up, and to grant elementary school teachers more time to prepare for classes.

Juneau teachers make $33,591 to $64,694 a year.

Tuesday night, about 215 teachers crowded into the School Board's meeting room, filled the central office hall and stood outside as several teachers urged the district to settle a contract. Teachers said they were willing to strike.

Jamie Marks, a teacher at Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School, said the amount and complexity of teachers' work has increased over the years but the package of pay and benefits "has been going backward."

Marks said he once paid nothing for health insurance premiums but now pays about $300 a month.

Barbara Mitchell, a Juneau teacher since 1982, said she spends about $1,000 of her own money on her classroom each year. Taking inflation into account, she will make 7 percent less this year than in 1994, she said.

Even without a new contract, the School Board has authorized eligible teachers to move up the salary schedule this year, which rewards teachers with about $1,200 more in pay for an added year of experience. But about 30 percent of teachers have reached the limit on the schedule for their level of education. And so far the board has balked at adding raises on top of that.

On Tuesday, the board amended this year's budget to spend $233,000 more on special education - for more teachers, aides and psychologists - because more students with intensive needs enrolled than were anticipated.

Even with that expenditure, the district will have a general fund balance of about $925,000 at the end of the school year, according to the district's analysis. The district had been projecting no balance at all.

But the district's audit showed there was about $120,000 more in the fund balance than officials had expected. Moreover, the district freed up about $300,000 for the general fund by paying for its summer school with a state grant.

And the district found it will spend nearly $600,000 less on teachers this school year than it had expected to, mainly because of the turnover of high-paid, experienced staff, who were replaced with lower-paid, less experienced teachers, said district Business Manager Gary Epperson.

But Epperson also presented the board with very tentative budgets for the next two school years that would require significant cuts to be balanced, even without granting raises of any kind.

The board is set to hold its first work session on the budgets for fiscal years 2005 and 2006 at 5 p.m. Nov. 18. A budget advisory group is scheduled to meet at 5:30 p.m. on Nov. 25, Dec. 8 and Dec. 11.

They will be told that the district must pay about $1.2 million more in each of the next two years into employee retirement funds.

For next school year, the administration has proposed reducing school bus service, eliminating a job that tracks truant students and eliminating the facilities supervisor's job. Other proposed cuts include spending less on a Tlingit-oriented program, the correspondence school, classroom materials and maintenance.

"These are things that we reflected to have a reconciled budget," Epperson said.

For the following year, the administration is looking at cutting as many as 20 teachers.

The budgets don't reflect any pay or benefit increases because those would have to be negotiated with unions, Superintendent Peggy Cowan said.

"That activity would obviously increase the burdens, and we need to come up with some other ideas (for cuts), as well," she said.