The Littleton Public Schools district is facing one of the worst financial crises in its history. Between $7.5 and $9 million will have to be cut from the LPS budget for the 2010-2011 school year.
At its latest meeting on Jan. 28, the LPS school board began to make specific recommendations and decisions about which programs to trim.
“The state budget crisis has hit the classroom,” board vice president Renée Howell said. “For so long we’ve done more with less, and now we’re doing less with less.”
Although these changes will inevitably affect Arapahoe, no official announcement has been made yet on how the cuts will impact staff and students.
The board recommended eliminating the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Field Elementary School and Newton Middle School and reducing the funding for the LPS literacy programs. In addition, the number of instructional coaches might be cut in half.
“IB is a choice program that we can’t afford,” Howell said. “It feels wrong to do, and yet there are those dollars that we have to come up with. It’s a place where two schools are getting something where other schools aren’t.”
The board members tried to keep the district’s core values in mind while making these recommendations.
“We are going to have to do things that none of us want to do,” board secretary Sue Chandler said. “We would love to honor the students’ requests [of maintaining the IB program], but all we can do right now is be responsible as to how to keep that budget maintained. I keep going over the core values that we try to stay true to and they include: maintaining safety, as much as possible, to keep staff reductions to a minimum, as much as possible, maintaining support, as much as possible, and don’t use one-time money for ongoing costs. We didn’t want to affect any one certain group. We didn’t always want to go to staff; we didn’t always want to go to parents; we didn’t always want to go to programs. We are trying to balance.”
Even though the board has made these specific recommendations, many questions remain unanswered. Superintendent Scott Murphy said that his biggest concern is the uncertainty of not knowing what will come and how this uncertainty keeps growing.
“There are words you don’t even feel anymore,” Murphy said. “You talk about pain, and you talk about anxiety and all this stuff so much that you almost become numb to it. But we also know that they are affecting people and their homes.”
Since the recommendations will not be finalized until June 2010, everything discussed at the board meetings will be revisited.
“At this point we have to start giving [the legislators] recommendations so they can start working on school-related issues,” board president Bob Colwell said. “We already know that the state is cutting our funding so what we need to do is look at ways we can get our spending into what needs to be.”
However, according to Howell, $7.5 million is the most positive number LPS district can expect.
“It’s going to get worse from here, unless it starts raining money or something,” Howell said. “I just want people to understand what we are up against.”
Board treasurer Lucie Stanish said that these decisions will have long-term consequences, but also believes that there is hope for the future.
“It’s horrible and my hope is that when things do recover we really have a plan to rebuild these critical areas,” Stanish said. “Hopefully this is just a short thing.”