Hopkins Superintendent Recommends $1.2M Investment in School Programs

Superintendent John Schultz has a big promise for the budget is putting together: “I think it’s a real exciting budget,” he promised.

“Exciting” isn’t a word normally associated with budgets. Schultz’s statement can seem akin to humorist Dave Barry’s zinger that IRS claims to have the best customer service in government were like saying "cement is a leader among construction materials for use as a dessert topping."

Preliminary information on the budget suggests there’s good reason to be excited, though. Schultz told School Board directors that he’ll propose a budget with more than $400,000 in additional ongoing expenditures and $800,000 in one-time expenditures.

“It’s a different budget than I’ve presented in the past,” he said.

Schultz won’t present proposals for how the money will be spent until the Feb. 16 meeting, and he declined to get into specifics until he had a chance to introduce the plan to the board then.

But he said in a brief interview after Thursday’s meeting that the ideas include support services to students—such as media specialists, paraprofessionals, challenge instructors or counselors—and program enhancements with an emphasis on “relevance.”

The proposals will not focus on a specific school or grade, Schultz said. Instead, they’ll take into account the entire system—from preschool to 12th grade.

“It’s really around Hopkins' excellence,” he said. “The content and instruction is relevant to how (students) learn and relevant to their world.”

The money would make up less than 1.5 percent of the district's general fund budget.

Under the plan, $147,000 of the ongoing funding would be for “program adjustments” that either restore funding to programs that had seen cuts or add money to places, such as Eisenhower Elementary, where funding hasn’t kept up with growth.

An additional $253,000 of ongoing funding would go toward “program enhancements” that augment what the district is already doing.

Hopkins has this money because of a combination of tighter bookkeeping and legislation that gave the district more freedom in how it spends its money.

John Toop, director of business services, asked Pam Carman, owner of Carman Consulting, to search through the district’s accounts for areas where his budgeting had been overly conservative in the past. She identified about $600,000 that could be freed up. Toop opted to recommend $400,000 be released for other programming in order to maintain a buffer.

“It was a good exercise to go through because we actually put some other things in the forecasting model as cross checks,” Toop said.

The district also plans to take advantage of new laws that loosened restrictions on staff development and capital outlay funds. Toop and Schultz want to spend $324,000 of staff development money and $426,000 of capital outlay money on other programs.

“We aren’t going to change the goals we have with our staff development,” Schultz said.

The budget that administrators are proposing will also set aside $1.2 million to account for teachers contract increases in excess of new revenues. that Hopkins earmark some of the district’s fund balance in order to underscore worries about where spending is headed.

That contract is 5.7 percent larger than the last one. Health care costs—which grew 8 percent in the first year and 5 percent in the second—accounted for the bulk of that growth, although there were wage increases of 1 to 1.5 percent.

The changes do not mean the district is awash in money, though. Delayed and stagnant state revenue remains just as problematic as ever.

But the district wants to boost declining enrollment, and Schultz intends for the one-time expenditures to “motivate change within the system.”

Administrators will present their proposals to School Board directors at 5 p.m. Thursday. They’ll present the ideas to the public at 6 p.m. Feb. 21, and board members will discuss the budget in-depth Feb. 23.