Teachers, but no one else, would receive a long-promised pay raise under a proposed spending plan for the 2023-24 school year released Thursday, but East Baton Rouge Parish school leaders have yet to identify a viable source of funding to maintain that higher pay in the future.
The limited pay raise is part of the proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins July 1. It would boost starting teacher salaries from $47,800 to $51,360 a year, putting the school system second only to Iberville Parish for the Baton Rouge region. That equates to 7.5%, close to the 8% hike that Superintendent Sito Narcisse first promised 11 months ago, though not as far reaching since it leaves out many employees.
“The district will work on a sustainable funding source for the salary increase for the 2024-2025 fiscal year,” Chief Financial Officer Kelly Lopez wrote in a memo that opens the budget book.
The board is not planning to vote on the proposed budget until June 29 — it postponed the regular June meeting by two weeks.
The board’s first official budget hearing is planned for June 1. A town hall also is planned from 6 to 8 p.m. May 30 at the Louisiana Leadership Institute, 5763 Hooper Road.
Board members, who met Thursday night, did not discuss the budget released hours earlier.
After the meeting, in an interview, Board President Dadrius Lanus promised that over the next month the board would work with staff to not only settle on a better foundation to fund the pay raise in the future, but also find money to fund a raise for other school employees.
Lanus said he has been working to make sure the final budget furthers district goals while sparing the classroom as much as possible.
“It won’t have hardly any impact on our classrooms, it won’t have hardly any impact on our employees,” Lanus promised.
Board members have their work cut out for them.
The budget released Thursday lists about $15.2 million in proposed spending cuts.
These include eliminating 64 Central Office positions. Many of these are high-level jobs, including four chief-level posts and nine executive directors. Estimated savings come to about $6.5 million.
Also on the chopping block is $6.7 million worth of contracts with outside vendors. The biggest is $2.9 million that the district now pays Arizona State University to staff the upper grades at EBR Virtual Academy. ASU educates about 250 of the 350 students at the virtual school, which expanded dramatically during the pandemic but has declined substantially from its peak.
Arcelius Brickhouse, chief of schools, said his staff is debating but has yet to decide whether to bring that program in-house or whether to use a different vendor for the program.
To stay in the black, about $17.6 million is being shifted from the district’s general operating fund to federal funding sources, mostly federal COVID relief funds. Those ample funds, however, are starting to run out and will cease after September 2024. Between now and then, the school system will have to either absorb those costs via its normal operating revenue or cut them entirely.
The biggest classroom impact would come from a proposed increase in the teacher-pupil ratio in the upper grades. Currently, the school system tries not to exceed 28 students per teacher in grades six to 12. The proposed budget would increase the maximum to 33 students per teacher in those grades. That’s the maximum class size allowed in those grades by state law.
The proposed pay raise clearly is a key source of budget pressure. Just increasing teacher pay is costing the district an estimated $21 million more a year. That figure will go up if support workers and other employees get a raise as well.
Charter school costs also keep growing. The proposed budget anticipates directing $155 million to charter schools next year, including two new charter schools and others that are expanding enrollment. That’s $31.7 million more than during the 2021-22 fiscal year, an increase of 31%.
The proposed 2023-24 budget released Thursday comes in two parts: the general operating budget and the special revenue fund budget.
The general operating budget, or general fund, accounts for 70% of all district spending and is the pot of money the school system turns to when it has unanticipated expenses.
The proposal released Thursday is a balanced general operating budget, though just barely. Expected revenue is clocking in at $544.3 million, just $138,000 more than estimated spending. Spending, however, is rising faster than revenue. General spending is expected to increase by about 9.2% in 2023-24 compared with the 2021-22 fiscal year, while revenue is expected to increase by only about 4.8%.
Strong finances of the recent past, however, have substantially boosted the district’s unrestricted reserves. The school system is estimating it will end the 2023-24 fiscal year with $91.4 million left in the bank, which is 21% more than it currently has there and 61% more than it had left over on June 30, 2022.
The proposed budget leaves those reserves untouched.
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