Two springs ago our school district was hit with a budget issue that required the school distrrict to really hunker down and cut some costs without jeopordizing the instructional program. Our district lost 6 million alone in the reassessment of a local shoping mall alone. We had to cut out 9 million dollars out of this year's budget and 4 million out of next year's budget. The goal was not to cut educational programs or staff. Our state also went to a referendum type of tax model to make things worse. We, as a district, put together committees at all levels of the organization to look at what we were spending versus what we really needed to make our programs work. One of the give backs we came up with involved student busing and start and end times of the school day for our students. Most of our students in the senior high school drive. Yet our district was providing bus transportation for all students regardless if they drove to school or not. Our district has three high schools and three middle schools in an established feeder pattern with the 10 elelmentary schools. Our feeder middle school is attached to our building on the same school plant/facility. We decided to start our school day later (trends in student/adolescent learning suggest later start times) by consolodating the bus runs to include both middle and high school students on one bus to and from school. We also gave incentives, cheaper parking spaces for high school students driving and car pooling. We also started an incentive for students to ride bicycles in good weather. Consolodating the bus runs and making similar start and finish times for the students on our campus will result in a savings of almost a half a million dollars for our district in one school year. Any questions give me a shout. The purpose of this example is to show what schools can do to accomplish things that are really in their control.
