Budget woes could hit Commerce school staff, programs

“That’s where the money is,” city schools superintendent Dr. James E. “Mac” McCoy said as he passed the unsettling news along at the school board work session Thursday. “Ninety percent of our budget goes to personnel. If you’re going to save anything, that’s what you got to look at.”

At a recent Georgia School Board Association conference, McCoy heard of a possible 6-10 percent reduction in state funds to schools next year due to a $2 billion shortfall in state revenue.

The superintendent noted a three-percent cut that school leaders have already implemented in this year’s budget for tough economic times.
“We had already adjusted our budget,” McCoy said. “I think we’ll be OK if we have to adjust a little bit more with our general reserve.
“Next year is going to be a different story.”

And the different story could mean making those hard decisions regarding personnel and programs.

Board member Arthur Lee Pattman also expressed his concern with what a financial crunch of this magnitude would mean.

“If you go to laying off teachers, then what happens in the classroom? If you go to cutting bus routes to save fuel, what happens to the kids, how do they get here? There’s a possibility that some of these things could happen here, which I’m hoping they don’t happen,” he said.
Pattman noted that cutting from schools is “not going to be popular with the public either.”

For the full story, see the Nov. 12 edition of The Commerce News.