NCSD financial forecast highlights BOE meeting

NORWALK — The final Norwalk City Schools Board of Education meeting before the school year finishes is usually one of the better meetings of the academic year. "But unfortunately with all the unprecedented chaos going on, it's hard to see where it's going," said board treasurer Joyce Dupont during Tuesday night's meeting — held virtually via a Zoom videoconference. The highlight of the meeting was Dupont's five-year forecast, a key talking point in light of last week's announcement that state funding for NCS was going to be reduced by $449,454. That move is part of the ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, which shut down all Ohio school buildings from March 16 through at least June 30. "It's a forecast more than ever before, because we really just don't know where things are heading," DuPont said. "We don't know when we're going to be coming out of this, so it's really just an estimate." Dupont noted the Foundation Funding from the state was a decrease of just over three percent for the district. Going forward for the 2020-21 school year, she built in a five percent decrease, which would be eight percent from the original funding for the current school year. "I've heard up to 10 percent, but nobody knows exactly where we're headed with this, either," she said. The district is looking at the current year being in the red at just under one million dollars ($977,000). Dupont said the plan for next year was to try and continue as the district stands to see what happens with the state funding, so she didn't change a lot in the forecast with the reductions. "Of course if they come in with a huge reduction, we'll have to look at this a little more," she said. Norwalk is looking at a deficit of $1.2 million for the next school year, which begins on July 1. "We do have the cash balance to cover that next year," Dupont said. "But if it does happen this way and we do end up with that $1.2 million— then in the following year we're going to have to seriously look at some major reductions, and unfortunately that means salaries. "But this just all depends on the economy and what happens with the funding going forward," she added. "So I don't want you to panic over these numbers, because we still have to wait and see." Dupont then stressed again to end her forecast report that there is a little cushion for the 2020-21 school year, but the great unknown still looms large. "If it doesn't get better, then it's going to get ugly," she said. "But again, this was difficult to do because we don't know what things will look like next year. We just don't know." In other news during Tuesday's meeting, Superintendent George Fisk said the supplemental contracts for spring sports coaches — baseball, softball and track and field — were compensated at a 60 percent rate. "Our coaches still did a number of things and continued to virtually communicate with our student athletes during the shutdown," Fisk said. "That period of time was 60 percent of the sports season, and we thought that was a fair compensation for the work they had done." In personnel items, the board approved the disability retirement for Regina Reed, and the retirement of Maplehurst teacher Roger Wilhelm. They also approved the employment of Anna Brown as the district's ESL (English Second Language) teacher. Also, the Norwalk Teachers Association announced its annual awards for the school year. Sarah Furey made the announcement, which included Dave and Jenny Daniels as the Friends of Education award winners. Dave has been the DARE officer for the past seven years in Norwalk, while Jenny is in her fourth year as the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) president. The annual Teacher of the Year award went to Norwalk Middle School Spanish teacher Beverly Will. Board member Duane Moore helped close the meeting by commending the "Adopt a Senior" Facebook group for the Class of 2020, as well as the plans to hold the NHS graduation ceremony at Summit Motorsports Park on May 30. "I just think the way our general public has stepped up to support our senior class has been fantastic," Moore said. "And I also want to commend George and (NHS principal) Brad (Cooley) for the work they've done on this graduation. I've heard from so many people that they are looking forward to it and that we had fantastic leadership on this."