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Plan on midyear cuts, school districts told
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Education proponents painted a grim picture Monday evening for school board members trying to grapple with the state of their district budgets.
Janice Palmer, director of government relations for the Arizona School Boards Association, and Chuck Essigs, director of government relations for the Arizona Association of School Business Officials, told members of the East Valley School Board Consortium that midyear cuts are inevitable and could be as high as 9 percent to 15 percent.
Even after Gov. Jan Brewer signed the current budget, there remained a gaping hole between revenue and expenditures in Arizona. The latest numbers, released by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee last week, put it at $2 billion, up from the original projection of $1.5 billion, Palmer told the group.
The budget that lawmakers presented to Brewer included a 2 percent cut to education. Brewer vetoed that cut, but Palmer and Essigs warned district board members, “be very, very cautious.”
“Do not plan on spending that. At the very least, those are things that need to be accounted for in the budget,” Palmer said.
Next school year, the budget picture looks grim again, Palmer said, with projections that put Arizona’s budget $4 billion over projected revenue.
The state will be unable to lean on federal stimulus dollars to make up a difference, this time around, Palmer said, because all of those dollars will have been spent.
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