Decatur hires consultant
Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008
DECATUR — A former local school-district superintendent was hired during a special schoolboard meeting Tuesday night to help the Decatur School District fight against annexation.
Lee Ortman was at the helm of the Gravette School District for 10 years before retiring about three years ago. The Decatur School Board voted unanimously to hire Ortman as a financial consultant at the rate of $ 250 a day, not to exceed $ 6, 000.
The board also approved giving permission to former Decatur superintendent Joe Brown and former Decatur financial secretary Alma Perkins to dig deep into the district’s financial records as they work with the district and Ortman to develop a plan that will persuade the Arkansas Board of Education not to force the district to be annexed. Brown and Perkins will work on a volunteer basis.
Bobby King, acting superintendent for the Decatur School District, also provided the board with updated figures on the district’s financial woes. King said after the meeting that the district would not contend the fiscal-distress classification, but the district is working very hard to fight being annexed. The school was more than $ 60, 000 in the red at the close of the 2008 fiscal year June 30 and is projected by the Arkansas Department of Education to have a negative balance of more than $ 600, 000 by the end of the next fiscal year.
Those figures led the ADE to identify the district as in fiscal distress and recommend that its schools be annexed into a neighboring district. The Arkansas Board of Education will make a decision July 14 on whether to officially classify the district as being in fiscal distress, and on July 31, the state board will consider the annexation issue.
King told the board that after examining the numbers, he realized that the $ 600, 000 projected shortfall, which was based on expenses from the fiscal year that just ended, is not accurate. There were about $ 300, 000 in one-time expenses, many associated with the opening of the new elementary school. Those expenses will not be incurred again during the new fiscal year.
“ That pretty well cuts (the $ 600, 000 figure ) in half, ” King said.
He will also look at the number of positions in the district that remain open that won’t have to be filled, thus saving the district money in salary and benefits expenses, he said. The district is receiving further help from the community. At least $ 100, 000 has already been raised through the Decatur Education Foundation, and the possibility of at least $ 100, 000 more might be coming in the near future, he said.
“ It’s a good start to a game plan that we can take to Little Rock, ” King said.
Beyond crunching those dollar figures, King is developing a plan to save the district money, including cutting operating expenses, he said.
In related news, several teachers who were at the school board meeting Tuesday voiced their concerns about their teaching contracts. There has not been a clear-cut answer on whether the teachers will have jobs if the district is annexed. The teachers’ concern is whether they would be legally able to get out of their contracts with Decatur in the event that they seek employment elsewhere and the Decatur district is allowed to remain intact.
The board members sympathized with the teachers and said they, too, were searching for the correct answers. King told the teachers he should know by Wednesday if the district will be allowed to release the teachers from their contracts.
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