For the first time in four years, the state won’t cut school funding for the 2012-13 academic year.
The news is a relief to Douglas County School District teachers and staff, braced for another round of potentially painful cost-saving measures.
Instead, they’ll likely get a 1 percent raise – the first in four years for teachers, five years for administrators – and a 1 percent retention bonus.
The district’s financial problems are not over, but its 2013 budget now will recommend increasing elementary school funding by $50 a student and leaving middle school funding at its current level. Cuts of $175 per high school student will be covered by shifting schedules and requiring high school instructors to teach additional classes.
Overall, it’s good news, the result of a slowly improving Colorado economy.
“The economists are telling us we shouldn’t necessarily raise the flag and say it’s over,” school district Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said. “At least for this moment in time, in Douglas County and the state of Colorado, revenues have increased and therefore there are not cuts to K-12 education next year.”
The high school cuts are the fallout from an $18.1 million shortfall the district still faces. Of that $18.1 million, almost $12 million is money borrowed from district savings to balance the 2011-12 budget. The decision to use that money was made in anticipation of an increased mill levy, defeated by voters during the November 2011 election. Another $4 million offset planned furlough days during the current academic year. The remaining deficit is from increased contributions to the Public Employees’ Retirement Association of Colorado (PERA).
High school teachers are picking up some of the slack. Instead of making cuts to salaries or eliminating classes, the district is asking high school teachers to add another class to their load. In the 2012-13 school year, they will teach six classes instead of five, saving the district about $3.6 million.
For instructors, Fagen said, “It’s taking the students they’ve been teaching, adding a few more to that, but spreading it over more sections.”
Another approximately $6 million comes from budgeted line items that Fagen said “were consistently and significantly higher than actuals.”
“In addition, we plan to reduce central administration by another $1 million, reduce central contingency by $1.6 million, and reduce central capital budgets by $3.4 million,” she wrote in an April 10 email to district parents.
The remaining approximately $2 million is among the hoped-for outcomes of negotiations with the teachers’ union. Those meetings, open to the public for the first time, were scheduled to begin April 11 in Castle Rock.
For more information on the budget, visit the district’s Web site at www.dcsdk12.org.
Algernon Moncrief posted at 11:34 am on Wed, Apr 11, 2012.
TEACHERS: MEET YOUR NEW PENSION LEADER.
The periodical Pensions and Investments has just reported that Meredith Williams, Executive Director of Colorado's public pension, PERA, is resigning effective June 30 to become Executive Director of the National Council on Teacher Retirement (NCTR).
Read the full story here:
http://www.pionline.com/article/20120405/REG/120409914/colorado-peras-top-exec-to-lead-teacher-retirement-council
According to their website, the NCTR is “dedicated to . . .promoting the rights and benefits of all present and future members of the (pension) systems.” Further, the NCTR aims to “assure self-sufficiency for retirees by providing a predictable benefit that is guaranteed for life” and to “preserve and protect the guaranteed rights of plan participants to their promised benefit.”
During his tenure at Colorado PERA, Meredith Williams and the PERA Board of Trustees pursued a controversial strategy for reducing PERA’s unfunded pension liabilities . . . taking fully-vested pension benefits from retired Colorado PERA members.
According to a few members of the Colorado Senate (one a prime sponsor of the legislation that took the retiree benefits) “fully 90 percent of the PERA fix comes from benefit cuts to current and future retirees” (Senators Josh Penry and Greg Brophy).
Soon, Meredith will be sitting down with his new board of directors. I propose that he break the ice by asking the board to settle the following pressing pension reform questions:
Does Colorado’s example of taking fully-vested retiree pension benefits conform with the mission of the NCTR to “promote the rights and benefits of present and future members”?
Does Colorado’s example of taking fully-vested retiree pension benefits conform with the mission of the NCTR to seek “self-sufficiency for retirees by providing a predictable benefit that is guaranteed for life”?
Does Colorado’s example of taking fully-vested retiree pension benefits conform with the mission of the NCTR to “preserve and protect the guaranteed rights of plan participants to their promised benefit”?
. . . and a few general pension reform questions hanging in the air:
Setting aside the morality of such reforms, is the taking of fully-vested, contracted, accrued and earned pension benefits a route that should be considered by state and local governmental entities?
Why should the contractual obligations of state and local governments to corporations take precedence over their contractual obligations to public employees?
Why should state and local governments be permitted by the courts to abandon their contractual obligations in order to make discretionary public expenditures?
Should pension plan sponsors have the ability to legally alter “automatic” statutory COLAs as opposed to “ad hoc” COLAs?
Do statutory COLA provisions somehow enjoy a lesser status in the law, less weight or force in the law, relative to all other statutory DB pension provisions?
As I understand it, state and local government contributions to their defined benefit plans are a fraction of (single digits) state and local government expenditures for all other purposes. What level must this ratio reach before a public plan is in a “crisis?”
Should plan sponsors have the ability to take fully-vested pension benefits from retirees before they have impacted the partially-vested pension benefits of current employees (see Colorado PERA, SB 10-001)?
Should the federal courts weigh in on state violations of state contracts (to the benefit of the states) or should state courts be the final arbiters?
Enquiring minds.
Visit saveperacola.com, Friend saveperacola on Facebook, support the Colorado pension theft lawsuit!