| 2 min read | by Lonnie Huhman, [email protected] |
During his update at the May 4 remote school board meeting, Dexter Community Schools Superintendent Chris Timmis gave a quick look ahead to the fall.
At this point there are a range of plans being talked about, but one thing is for sure, the start of the school year will probably look different than those in the past.
“What we know is that there’s probably a very slim likelihood that next school year looks like every other school year,” Timmis said.
He said the administrative team has been talking about six scenarios that look at a range of possibilities, from bringing back the students into the building with physical distancing and different health restrictions; starting school in September and potentially having intermittent shut downs in specific buildings or district-wide if people start to get sick; start with remote learning with the hope of transitioning back into the buildings; work in smaller numbers of students at a time, alternate rotating schedules; teach remotely for an entire semester or year, and create an entire new model.
Timmis said the planning and scenarios look at the whole spectrum.
“From as close to normal as could be to one of the more extreme,” he said. “We don’t know where we land on this yet because as you’ve seen in the last six or eight weeks how fast the information has changed, but what we know is that we are already planning for fall. So we need to start working on plan A, B, C, D to figure out what our pivots are.”
Another part of looking ahead is the budget, which the school district is expecting to put in place a new one at the end of June.
According to the minutes from school board’s finance committee, the committee discussed at their April 22 meeting the current status and anticipated 2019-20 budget results due to impacts of the shutdown.
“Per the Governor’s order, all staff are being paid base salaries as budgeted,” the minutes said. “There will be some positive variances. The largest negative variance will be the increased need for subsidizing the revenue generating programs, Community Ed and Athletics. We still should be near break even for 2019-20.”
The committee also reviewed and discussed preliminary budget scenarios for 2020-21, and requested a range of scenarios including: student count growth 0 with a $212 reduction in foundation, a decrease in 30 students with a $325 reduction in foundation, and a decrease in 30 students with a $212 reduction in foundation.
The foundation allowance is the amount, per pupil, allocated to school districts from the state.
“Long range trends are not meaningful under the current climate, so scenarios should reflect 2020-21 and 2021-22 only,” the minutes said. “The requested scenarios will be presented to the Board of Education on May 4 for Board direction on the parameters for further development of the 2020-21 budget. The Committee also requested input from the Board on a target revenue under expense for 2020-21.”
The school board will revisit the budget discussion at the May 18 meeting.
