School board to tackle debt

By Lauren Radomski (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Monday, December 3, 2007

Members of the Fergus Falls school board will meet today to discuss how to restore the district’s financial health.

Fergus Falls schools are currently in statutory operating debt (SOD), with a deficit of 6.6 percent of its general fund balance. Mark Masten, the district’s business manager, said the deficit is the result of many factors, from the cost of special education services to declining enrollment.

Perhaps the biggest factor, Masten said, is inefficient facilities: The cost of running district buildings doesn’t change with fewer students.

“As enrollment declines, we can’t take away bricks fast enough” to efficiently accommodate the smaller population, Masten said.

Like all districts in SOD, Fergus Falls is required to submit a plan to the Minnesota Department of Education showing how it will get out of debt in no more than three years. Part of that plan includes district and community demographics, school report card data and enrollment projections, information Masten, Superintendent Jerry Ness and other administrators have been pulling together the past few weeks. Today the school board will address how exactly to trim the budget and get back on track financially.

Whatever the specifics of their decisions, Ness said, recovering from SOD will require major changes to the district, changes administrators have seen coming for some time.

“We need to remind people that we’re reorganizing our district,” Ness said. “We need to get to the point where we’re efficient enough to keep under budget.”

And that will mean cuts. While administrators have not yet determined how much to trim from next year’s budget, the scope of the changes should not be underestimated.

“It will hit every single area,” Ness said, from administration to teaching to transportation.

The school board will also look at ways to increase district revenue, Ness said. One possibility is raising the cost of entry to district activities.

Administrators said they hope to send a first draft of the Fergus Falls SOD plan to the state before Christmas, allowing time for feedback and adjustments before the submission deadline of Jan. 31. The school board is tentatively scheduled to approve the final version of the plan at its Jan. 14 meeting.

The decisions the school board makes in the next few weeks will guide district spending for the next few years, and once those decisions are made, Ness said, there’s no turning back.

“We’ve got to live the plan now,” he said.