How will U-46 cut $40 million from budget?

Elgin Area School District U-46 may have spent the past year and a half trimming millions from its budget, but those efforts have fallen drastically short.

On Monday, Chief Financial Officer Ron Ally told the school board that $40 million more in reductions must be made next school year to avoid an even deeper deficit.

With the equivalent of 348 full-time positions already eliminated, swimming pools being drained, athletic "B" teams cut, staff stipend and supply budgets slashed, what else can possibly give?

The district's 27-member Budget Advisory Task Force, chaired by Ally, is assigned with finding a way to cut the $40 million from next year's budget. Their deadline is Jan. 31.

Staff positions, salaries and benefits - representing roughly 80 percent of the district's $400 million budget - will undoubtedly be the hardest hit, Ally said. A reduction in force is expected.

And many other options are also on the table, according to notes from recent meetings.

Those options include instituting "pay to play" sports; cutting assistant principals; increasing class sizes; moving to a four-day week; putting advertising on school buses; selling off surplus property; having principals be responsible for more than one campus; and many, many more.

Yet unlike Wheeling Elementary District 21, which last week announced it would look to close an elementary school and moving to a grade-based schools model to save money in the long term, U-46 isn't considering either of those options, Ally said.

Closing an early childhood learning center, however, is on the list of possibilities.

The $40 million in cuts would whittle down the previous years' deficit of $48.6 million and help balance next year's budget.

And even that may not be enough.

Outside financial consultant PMA Financial Network Inc., has projected U-46's deficit to be at $63.6 million if no additional cuts are made. That projection is considered very conservative, because it assumes no raises for employees and stable state revenue. Several union contracts, including that of the Elgin Teachers' Association, are up in the coming months, and the state is nearly $20 million behind in its payments to the district.

This is not the first time the state's second-largest school district has found itself deep in the red.

In 2003, to trim $40 million from its deficit, the district let about 800 nontenured teachers go. Class sizes rose to 35 students per teacher.

"I think we seriously need to consider a measured approach to dealing with the deficit," Elgin Teachers Association President and Task Force member Tim Davis said Tuesday. "We need to know that next year, 41,000 students will arrive in our schools. And the question becomes what programs will they have access to? Programs are people."

As the clock ticks down to Jan. 31, Ally said he imagines task force members will "develop a survey. I will talk the group through the survey items. Try not to tell them my opinion. And then have them vote on the items until they get to $40 million. ... That's why you have to talk about things that limit employees. You're not going to get there with (cutting spending on) paper clips."