If you go
What: Boulder Valley school board budget work session
When: 6 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Boulder Valley Education Center, 6500 East Arapahoe Road, Boulder
More info: bvsd.org
The Boulder Valley school board will get its first look at next school year’s budget numbers at a work session Tuesday.
The meeting is expected to cover preliminary numbers based on enrollment projections, cost-of-living salary increases and current state funding estimates. The district is projecting a modest 1 percent increase in student enrollment.
“The work session is a starting place,” said Boulder Valley Superintendent Bruce Messinger. “It gets us all on the same page. We want to give the board a better sense of where we might land when everything settles.”
The state Legislature has yet to approve the $160 million Student Success Act, which provides additional money for K-12 education. The bill recently was approved in the House and goes to the Senate next.
The bill currently includes a $110 million increase to reduce the $1 billion “negative factor,” the work-around employed by the Legislature to make cuts to K-12 funding despite constitutionally required increases in education spending.
Messinger — who along with superintendents from almost all the other school districts have lobbied state Legislature to restore past K-12 funding cuts instead of tying money to new initiatives — said he’s still pushing for more money to reduce the negative factor shortfall.
“We’d like to think we could do more yet,” he said.
Leslie Stafford, Boulder Valley’s chief financial officer, said the best estimate based on what’s in the current bill is per-pupil funding of $6,924 for next school year, up from $6,546 this school year.
Along with per-pupil money, the district expects to see $300,000 more to implement the READ Act, a 2012 state law that requires individual literacy plans and evaluations for kindergarten through third-grade students. Another $300,000 for English-language learners and other at-risk populations also is expected to go to Boulder Valley based on the current bill.
On the expense side, the district is budgeting for a 2.8 percent cost-of-living increase for employee salaries, a number that could change during salary negotiations.
The district is negotiating salary increases with its employee groups, including teachers, this month. The district and the teachers’ union will be in the third year of a three-year contract that stipulated salary increases in the first two years, but left increases for the third year up to negotiations.
The district also is expecting an increase in health insurance costs.
Once the basics are funded, Messinger said, the first priority likely will be to stop using one-time money from year-end funds to pay for literacy resources and make those expenses an ongoing part of the budget.
As part of budget cuts a couple of years ago, the district reduced the number of literacy specialists, who provide intensive small-group and one-on-one help to struggling readers.
But after hearing from concerned parents and teachers, the district added staff time at some schools using one-time money.
This school year, the district spent about $1.7 million on one-time money for literacy, while maintaining the same level of services would cost about $1.8 million next year.
“We don’t want to be dependent on end-of-year money,” Messinger said.
Class size also may come up in budget discussions.
Messinger said the district is planning to keep the number of teachers the same next school year, while also setting aside as much as $1 million to add teachers in “hot spots” around the district to relieve crowding.
Contact Camera Staff Writer Amy Bounds at 303-473-1341, boundsa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/boundsa.