School District 2 Superintendent Greg Upham announced on the 12th that the Billings elementary school district is expecting a four million dollar budget shortfall for the 2020-2021 school year. While the high school district is expected to be within their budget thanks to voters backing a high school mill levy this year, the elementary district had no such levy to make up for their deficit.
The school board is now faced with the task of finding $4 million worth of items to cut from the 2020-21 budget to make up for the deficit, with Upham stating he will release the extent of the cuts in coming weeks. Upham said he does not want the cuts to make an impact on student safety, which means no cuts to school resource police officers, social workers, and nurses who are all included in the current general fund budget but are not accounted for by the state for funding. In addition, he doesn’t want to eliminate elementary programs saying cuts should stay away from the classroom. Instead he suggests reducing programs instead of fully eliminating them.
Upham said that the school district arrived at this deficit in part by the construction of the Ben Steele and Medicine Crow middle schools in addition to the hiring of more staff who were needed to keep the district’s state accreditation. He said, “What I asked of our chief financial officer was a regressive analysis to see what happened. We could see that the two years prior to the two new middle schools coming on line, in conjunction with the additional acquisition of full time equivalent employees to address accreditation deficiencies was a part of that, in conjunction with the operating expenses of the two middle schools.”
There is frustration with the way the state funds large school districts like SD2. While Upham says he doesn’t blame the state for the shortfall, he says questions should be asked about the state’s funding formula, which is based on enrollment and provides 80% of elementary school funding. “We need the cost index to come in higher, the support from the state to be higher, and we also need our enrollment to continue to grow. We’ve kind of been a little bit flat, not horribly flat, but if we continue to grow that will help us along with some of the cuts. But again, in a school budget there isn’t a whole lot of fat, if you will. I have concerns about going into the budget and cutting having a detriment to our students.”
