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The Federal Hocking school board will consider laying off teachers to address projected budget deficits
By: David Forster
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STEWART, Ohio (WOUB) — The Federal Hocking school board may vote to cut teachers at its meeting next week to address budget deficits projected to begin this year and grow each year after.
The district’s preliminary five-year budget forecast shows a budget shortfall of $365,533 this school year. This nearly doubles to $691,822 next year, and the shortfall keeps rising to nearly $1.6 million for the 2028-29 school year.
The district has enough in its cash reserves to absorb these deficits, but those reserves would steadily dwindle until at some point they are depleted.
If the board is going to lay off teachers, it needs to take action soon. It must notify the teachers’ union 60 days in advance of any planned layoffs. The board’s next regular meeting is Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Amesville Elementary.
The school year ends the last week of May, and some in the audience said teachers should be given as much notice as possible so they can find another job because this is the time of year when much of the hiring takes place for the next school year.
The projected deficits are driven in large part by declining enrollment, which is a problem at schools throughout southeast Ohio and in other rural parts of the state.
The district would need more than 100 new students just to break even at the end of the next school year.
Instead, as of mid-February the district had lost 194 students, Superintendent Jason Spencer told the board. Of this number, he said, 109 are now being homeschooled and 52 are in a virtual program.
Another big drain on the district’s budget is health insurance costs, which rose substantially over the past couple of years and are expected to increase another 10 percent next year, Bruce Steenrod, the district’s treasurer, told the board.
Meanwhile, the governor’s proposed budget, which is now working its way through the Legislature, calls for cutting more than $100 million in funding to traditional public schools.
Also, the state has opted to calculate how much money each district will receive for the next two years based on the average cost to operate schools in 2021-22. So the formula will not reflect increases in costs for wages, health insurance and other operational expenses since then.
The district’s budget forecast reflects this decision, Steenrod said.
About 85 percent of the district’s costs are wages and benefits, so it doesn’t have a lot of room elsewhere in the budget to offset the projected deficits.
Spencer said the district will probably need to trim about $1 million in expenses to get the budget under control. The district would save about $100,000 for every full-time position it cuts, Steenrod said.
Cutting teachers will increase class sizes. Several people in the audience said this is something they want to avoid, saying it could lead to lower student performance and result in more parents removing their children from district schools.
The district hasn’t put a levy on the ballot in decades, and some suggested now might be the time and floated the idea of a tax on income instead of property.
Steenrod said a 1 percent levy on earned income, which would exclude retirement income like Social Security benefits, would raise about $1.43 million a year.
The deadline to get a levy on the November ballot would be sometime in mid-July.