TAX NEWS - June 2010
Pennsylvania Tax: Teachers' jobs may take a hit as board approves tax hike
Although the school board could have crafted a budget that carried a 5-percent tax increase it went with a smaller budget as the starting point of what could be some major changes for the district.
The approved budget could furlough more than 20 teachers and aides including gifted, special education and all of the district's instructional-support teachers.
The state education department still has to approve the district's proposed "program modifications." The school district can cut jobs, not teachers. State code dictates which teachers are furloughed by least time served.
Before approving the budget on Tuesday, the school board and administrators honored retiring longtime district employees with personal anecdotes, praise and applause. But as Carla Skuchas, president of the Radnor Township Education Association, the union that represents teachers, said, "Saying goodbye to teachers to be furloughed feels less benign."
While the school board is not responsible for the teacher policy that will cause some newly hired teachers to be furloughed, it is accountable for choosing the furlough for the budget, said Wayne Elementary School parent Julia Bohnenberger.
There's an "atmosphere of despair and gloom palpable" at the school, said Bohnenberger, who noted that the proposed furlough would unequally affect the school.
A number of school-board members have said that beyond the positions furloughed next year (which also include a librarian and the district's sole social worker) the district also has to permanently reduce its total "fixed costs," meaning reducing the total compensation that now accounts for about three-fourths of its annual expenses.
The sole public speaker in favor of the proposed budget was Radnor resident Sarah Armstrong, who said of Radnor taxpayers, "People are struggling here, even if it seems otherwise."
Armstrong said the fact that the teachers who were eligible to take an early-retirement incentive package offered by the school district chose not to take the package directly led to the furlough of the teachers with less seniority.
Seventeen of 30 eligible teachers would have had to take the incentivized offer in order to make it successful budgetwise.
Teachers, parents and students have made passionate pleas to the board to spare their favorite programs and instructors, some even asking to raise taxes to do so.
But some board members said that they also represent a majority of taxpayers who do not have children in Radnor public schools and who have paid tax increases year after year.
"We need to move to a cost structure that we will be able to afford under Act 1," said board member Pattie Booker during the May 10 proposed-final-budget discussion. She also said it is the first year that the district is really feeling the effects of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 2006, which caps school-district real-estate tax increases.
Booker said Tuesday that while the approved budget required "very difficult" cuts, those for the 2011-12 budget could be "draconian."
"We all recognize that the teachers are the core, the capital equipment," said Booker, who called the cuts "a reality."
Many people in the meeting audience Tuesday were hoping the board would pass a budget with a 5-percent increase.
But the board voted 7-2 for the $75.9-million operating budget; board members Chuck Madden and Lydia Solomon cast the dissenting votes.
President of the board Greg McNicholas tried to put the current and future fiscal challenges into perspective. "The sky is not falling. Radnor is a wonderful place and it will continue to be a wonderful place," he said.
The $75,945,788 final budget for 2010-11 will require a tax levy of 20.8681 mills for each $1,000 of assessed valuation on real estate.
Eighty-eight percent of the district's budgeted revenues come from local taxpayers, according to the district.
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