DeKalb nixes tax increase. Will cut staff, schools.
From the AJC breaking news desk:
The DeKalb County school board will vote on a budget with at least 427 layoffs, seven teacher furlough days and at least four school closings.
On Friday morning, the board’s four-member budget committee adopted a tentative budget with $115.8 million in cuts and no tax hike.
Board members H. Paul Womack, Don McChesney and Jay Cunningham voted in support of the budget. Board member Eugene Walker voted against the proposal, saying he wants to raise taxes.
The budget includes laying off 200 paraprofessionals, 150 central office employees, 59 media clerks and 18 technical specialists.
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104 comments Add your comment
dekalb teacher
March 29th, 2010
8:01 pm
Allen: After digging deeper into the poor county controversy, the revenue in question refers to state funds to school districts whose wealth per student is below the 75th percentile of all districts in the state. Again, this is state funding not funding from other counties. In FY 2006 and 2007, Gwinnett did not qualify for this “Educational Equalization Funding Grant” In FY 2008 and 2009, the county qualified for 32 million dollars. However the governors budget included a reduction of 14 million dollars. This is not money coming from other counties. In fact, Dekalb also received the funds from the state. Regardless of the fact, many of the teachers also come from other counties and pay taxes to their counties. For Dekalb, or any other county for that matter, to reduce the salaries of the teachers as drastically as they have rather than have their own citizens pay at least some of the price to reduce the budget is unfair to all those concerned.
Angela
March 29th, 2010
9:12 pm
Ramona (no educational or business experience) Tyson will be taking over? She’s the one who is cutting teacher positions and schoolhouse personnel while keeping almost all personnel outside the schoolhouse who have absolutely NO contact with students. If’s no surprise that DeKalb has lost more in property values than any area in metro Atlanta – our school system is the bottom of the barrel and our BOE members keep on supporting the worst administrators in the metro area.
Jabberwocky
March 29th, 2010
9:47 pm
@where is Jim Cherry……….Read that article and many others like it…
I did not say that the Social Security wage limit for the contribution won’t go up, or that the retirement age won’t go up….in fact, I am sure they must.
What I said was….Social Securiy will not go broke. AND the SS fund is owed billions from IOU’s from other gov’t depts that have borrowed from the well funded Social Security bank.
No legislator who wants to be re-elected will EVER vote to do away with it.
One of the reasons…..
It is very unlikely that most workers can save enough in a 401K or IRA to last them through retirement. I know that, because I had both an IRA and 401K….well funded…in stocks, bonds, and some totally safe investments ..and if I had to live off that alone, well funded though it is, well……I would be homeless!!!!!!
Allen
March 30th, 2010
3:37 pm
dekalb teacher–
Just for the record, I am 100% in agreement with you on this one: “For Dekalb, or any other county for that matter, to reduce the salaries of the teachers as drastically as they have rather than have their own citizens pay at least some of the price to reduce the budget is unfair to all those concerned.”
I’d add reducing the number of teachers/parapros to that as well, and note that not only taxes but cuts to admin staff back to 2005 or so levels are in order.
But my understanding of the equalization process is simply this: 1. in a “poor” county, which seems somewhat arbitrarily defined, one can pay less taxes on a $165K home than in a “rich” county (e.g., DeKalb) and receive from the state education aid that comes in part (not a huge part, but in part) from taxes paid by the “rich” county taxpayer, at the higher rate.
I was really just trying to make the point that the equalization process is a part, though not a major one, of our problem in education funding in DeKalb. The real issues are the out of whack budget priorities of DCSS, the out of whack budget priorities under the Gold Dome, falling tax revenues, and the economy, in that descending order.