Beaufort Co. school board wants to know by January whether district layoffs will happen
A Beaufort County Board of Education member’s request for his colleagues to review staffing needs by January brought up a challenge for their new, longer budget approval process: an efficiency study, proposed by superintendent Frank Rodriguez to look at staffing needs for the district, won’t be completed until March or April at the earliest, according to district officials.
“When you deal with people and you deal with salaries, you’ve got to give them notice,” said Richard Geier, who represents Burton and parts of Okatie on the board, Friday. “If you’re going to be looking at cutting anybody, you need to do it not in April, not in May, but you need to be thinking about it in January or so.”
Rodriguez first floated the idea of an efficiency study in his interview process last spring, he said Friday.
The district hasn’t sent out a bid for companies to conduct the study yet, chief financial officer Tonya Crosby said, but will be sent “probably in the next week.”
Crosby told the board’s finance committee on Oct. 17 the contractor for the efficiency study would likely be selected and ready to start in January; she estimated their work would take two to three months.
“If we’re going to look at January to start cutting teachers, and doing other things to limit the human resources without (Rodriguez) having the chance to look at it in terms of a personal vetting process along with the study, I think it’ll be unfair to him,” Hilton Head board member Mel Campbell said Friday.
Staffing makes up about 80 percent of the district’s budget, which is $254 million for the 2019-20 year.
That budget passed 8-2 at Beaufort County Council in June, about a week before their deadline to pass or continue the last year’s budget for teachers’ first paychecks of the year in August.
It came after several calls for millions in budget cuts by County Council and the board in June — which the board did, by a mere $3,000.
At a special-called June meeting ahead of County Council’s last vote on the budget, the board cut $1,687,714 from the budget, reducing district travel, student drug-testing programs, school supply allocations, board funding, instructional software and departmental funds.
They shifted that funding to restore $1.4 million for 15 instructional coach positions, who had been abruptly cut from the budget 10 days prior, a move that stunned Denise Bell, the 2018-19 teacher of the year for Hilton Head Island Elementary School.
“I was hired as numeracy coach for Hilton Head Island Elementary School last month,” she told the board in June. “However, before I had a chance to begin, my job’s in jeopardy.”
The board also voted to use to use $290,093 from the $293,175 in cuts that did not cover the restoration of instructional coaches to increase salaries for data clerks.
“We didn’t vet the budget very well. (On June 21), we vetted the budget like we should have for the last year,” Campbell said at the time. “But at this 12th hour I don’t think we can do a better job.”
For six of the board’s 11 members, who were sworn in in January, that summer was their first brush with the budget. Friday’s meeting was one of the first steps in the board’s newly approved longer budget vetting process, and the new method has some growing pains, the efficiency study chief among them.
“I’m not opposed to trying to get it faster,” Rodriguez said of the study Friday. “I want it in your hands as soon as possible, but I want confidence in it.”
This story was originally published October 25, 2019 at 3:35 PM.