CROWN POINT — Following 48 potential layoff notices handed to Crown Point Community School Corp. teachers this week, more letters were to go to support personnel and administrators, Superintendent Teresa Eineman said Thursday.
“A process for primary reduction-in-force notices began Monday,” Eineman said. “We completed that process yesterday.
“Today and tomorrow we will issue three other letters — one for administration, one for support staff and one for teachers holding extracurricular assignments.”
The reduction in force or RIF notices were issued to teachers at all school levels, Eineman said. “It’s very painful to receive a letter of this nature,” she said. “They are the heartbeat of our school corporation.”
All employees in support, administrative and extracurricular will receive letters of possible layoffs, Eineman said. “It’s a courtesy, it’s not required by law.”
Support staff includes secretaries, custodians, teacher assistants, food service employees, bus drivers and others.
Extracurricular assignments include sponsors who receive a stipends for activities such as the music, academic and robotic teams.
Eineman said RIF notices were not being issued as scare tactics in order to coerce taxpayers to vote in favor of the school tax levy resolution May 3. If passed, the resolution would impose an additional property tax rate of up to 21 cents on every $100 of assessed valuation.
Registered voters in Center and Winfield townships are eligible to vote on the referendum.
“By state statute we are required to notify teachers 30 to 40 days prior to board action,” Eineman said. The School Board will consider, if necessary, a reduction in force at its May 23 board meeting, she said.
The corporation has cut its budget by $4.5 million in the past two years, cutting 42 positions and reducing extracurricular positions like bus duty workers and teacher assistants, who are now volunteers.
State increase coming
Eineman said House Bill 1001, the General Assembly’s proposed two-year budget bill, would increase funding, but not enough.
“Our referendum is for a third of our deficit,” she said. “In order for it to be more, we’re depending on the legislation for changes in the funding formula,” she said.
“I don’t want to conjecture until the legislation is passed,” Eineman said. “Many things can change between now and then. The state doesn’t have the funding to overhaul the funding formula in this economy. Whatever changes are made we hope helps Crown Point schools.”
The bill has passed the House and is now in the Senate.
According to Rep. Jeff Thompson, R-Lizton, a member of the Education Committee, Crown Point is similar to Indianapolis suburban schools, which have fewer students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches.
“Past funding practice has not helped Crown Point,” Thompson said.
House Bill 1001, if passed as is, would help Crown Point long-term, but it would be 2012 before Crown Point would begin to see the money.
“It may be true that it just isn’t happening fast enough for Crown Point,” Thompson said. “There may be some tweaks but the overall philosophy will stay there.”
Formula tweaked
Rep. Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, said the complexity index that heavily drove education dollars based on free and reduced-price lunches, hurt Crown Point.
Additionally, he said, “the old funding formula doesn’t favor growing schools like Crown Point.
When revenue came from property taxes, “Poor inner-city schools lost out to wealthier schools,” Soliday said. “So they wanted more school revenue from sales and income tax. We’d gotten to 80 percent paid by the state, then the tax caps hit in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and we picked up the remaining 20 percent.”
Soliday said he and other legislators don’t mind assisting the poorer school systems but find fault with “all kinds of special deals and special funding to where you wind up with the formula jacked out of shape.”
“Gary gets several million more a year than Hammond. They have similar complexity indexes but Gary has more special deals. HB 1001 has something that over a number of years starts to even that out.
“Crown Point still doesn’t have a windfall out of that because it doesn’t have many free and reduced lunches,” Soliday said.
Mike Dexter, chairman of Schools Worth Saving, the citizen group supporting the Crown Point referendum, said the grass-roots organization had a sign rally last weekend with more than 100 volunteers placing signs throughout the city.
We’ve got a lot of volunteers going door to door getting the word out,” he said. “I think people are starting to learn how these changes came about and the funding formula punished us for having excellent schools. We can’t just sit and wait for something to happen.”