Larry Grooms presents his staffing report at a special school board meeting.According a report submitted to the school board Aug. 7 by Larry Grooms, a school finance coordinator with ODE’s Mason district office, New Richmond is overstaffed in most areas including classroom teachers.
“The staffing analysis by the State Board of Education validated what I think many of us believed, that compared to similar districts we are overstaffed in several areas,” said New Richmond superintendent Adam Bird. “It has significant meaning for our district when we have someone from the state Department of Education come in and tell us we have too many teachers.”
New Richmond employed 31.82 classroom teachers in excess of state minimum requirements during its 2010 fiscal year and 22.38 teachers above comparable districts at an estimated cost of $85,655 per teachers including benefits.
New Richmond employed 21.99 Educational Service Personnel (ESP) during FY2010 which in 11.94 positions above comparable districts. ESP personnel include counselors, music teachers, PE teachers, instructional aides, bus drives and custodians.
In addition to classroom personnel, the analysis found that New Richmond has 1.79 bookkeeping personnel per 1000 students, 1.10 bus drives per 1000 students and 3.63 custodians per 1000 students above comparable districts.New Richmond, which faces a loss of $8 million a year after 2016 when the state stops reimbursing the district for money lost due to electrical utility deregulation, spends 77 percent of its $26 million annual budget on salaries and benefits.
“When we look at it in light of the fact that we know our revenue is going to be decreasing dramatically by almost a third of our budget, it has a huge impact on our school district,” said Bird. “I think our community and staff need to know that we can’t cut enough in order to balance our budget. The cutting of our expenses is going to have to be balanced by an increase in revenue.
“And our school board and our administrators are going to be meeting and looking closely at those issues.”
One area the ODE report found New Richmond wasn’t overstaffed was in administration. The district is down to 11 administrators, well under other Clermont County schools (16.3 average) and the state average (18.0) in the report.
The number of administrators dropped by one this week when Jay Blavatt, vice principal at the high school, resigned to take a job in Plant City, Florida.
“That position will not be replaced,” Bird said.
Regardless of cuts the district will be forced to make in the future, Bird said the district is committed to maintaining its high academic standard.
“We are an excellent school district and we believe we will be excellent with distinction this year, and we want to continue to be an excellent school district for our community,” said Bird.
“That’s always going to be our expectation and that expectation is not going to drop, but we are going to have to do it with less resources and at some point we are going to have to go to the good people of our community and ask for their help.”
Read the staffing report
