Budget down, class sizes headed up for K-12

ATLANTA — State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox told lawmakers Wednesday that state budget cuts would have a serious effect on every school system in the state. But she stopped short of calling for new funding, focusing instead on a need to give systems more flexibility on class sizes as the state works through a revenue crisis.

“It will be a time ... (to) more than tighten our belts,” Cox said. “We have to ask the fundamental question: What can we stop doing for a little while?”

The state will cut hundreds of millions of dollars from K-12 education to make it through the rest of this fiscal year, largely by adding three unpaid furlough days to the three teachers already took.

No furloughs are planned for fiscal 2011, which begins July 1, but there are major cuts in that budget, too. In fiscal 2008, Georgia taxpayers put nearly $7.8 billion into K-12 education. For fiscal 2011, Gov. Sonny Perdue has called for just under $7 billion in state funding.

Local school systems, which get money from the state, will have to cut their own budgets or raise local property taxes to make up the difference. Cox is pushing for waivers that would allow all systems to increase class sizes until 2013. Maximum sizes would differ by grade level, but Cox said she hopes high school classes won’t need to grow past their current maximum of 32 students.

Meanwhile, entire programs would disappear from the budget come July 1.

Bonuses for nationally certified teachers? They’re gone in Perdue’s budget proposal. Also missing are the Georgia Youth Science and Technology Center and the National Science Center and Foundation.

Funding also would be eliminated for Regional Education Service Agencies, which focus on teacher development, technology training and other areas, particularly in rural areas. They would be done away with starting July 1, saving the state about $12 million a year.

“The (fiscal) ’11 budget takes away our ability as a state to do anything to help our schools,” Cox said of the change.

Extra federal funding will actually boost Georgia’s total K-12 spending in fiscal 2011 to $9.75 billion, which is more than in previous years. Cox said the federal money “sure looks good on paper,” but it can only be used in certain ways and for certain students.

In the end, extra federal funding helps “less than half of our students, and over a million students are in schools that do not qualify for that increased federal expenditure,” Cox said.

State Sen. Cecil Staton, R-Macon, sat through Cox’s budget hearing Wednesday and called some of the cuts “staggering.” He noted that, as the state Legislature wrestles with Perdue’s budget recommendations, things could change.

But there are no plans to raise state taxes, and there are no large reserves left to dip into. Other parts of the state budget have been cut deeper than education, leaving little hope among the majority at the Capitol that significant new funding can be found for schools.

Democrats, though, are seizing on the cuts to make their case with voters. State Rep. DuBose Porter, D-Dublin, and a 2010 gubernatorial candidate, kept up his push Wednesday to improve state sales tax collections. Porter and the Georgia Department of Revenue differ about how much uncollected revenue is out there, but a recent pilot program comparing local business license records to state sales tax receipts makes it clear that the state is leaving “a huge revenue source” on the table, Porter said.

“When the governor repeatedly cuts education, it increases property taxes at the local level,” Porter said in a news release Wednesday. “It is also unnecessary.”

Meanwhile, local systems are dealing with the fallout from cuts. Peach County schools are in session only four days a week. Rural systems will be hit harder by the defunding of Regional Education Service Agencies.

“I do not know how I’m going to go back and talk to these school boards,” state Sen. George Hooks, an Americus Democrat who represents parts of Peach County, told Cox on Wednesday. “Have you got an answer that I can give?”

Cox’s best answer?

“We’ve got to give them flexibility,” she said. “We’ve got to look at class size.”

To contact writer Travis Fain, call 361-2702.