Fiscal surprise: School ‘efficiency review’ recommends more new spending than savings, worsening budget dilemma
Editor’s Note: This is the first of several articles on the findings of the school review.
By James P. Gannon
The highly anticipated outside consultant’s “efficiency review” of Rappahannock County Public School operations that was unveiled Tuesday evening contained a surprising bottom line: It recommended more new spending than savings–providing no relief for the “fiscal crisis” confronting the school system’s budget.
The consultant’s inch-thick report of some 250 pages, in the works since last fall, was presented to a small audience at Rappahannock County High School by an official of MGT America, Inc., an educational consulting firm hired to review all school operations and finances with an eye to making recommendations for budget savings and efficiencies.
But when all of the 78 recommendations of the firm were tallied up at the end of the report, the result was more like an unexpected bill than a savings certificate.
MGT calculated the potential cost savings of all its recommendations at $62,600 per year, or $313,000 over five years. But its recommendations for various improvements came with added costs of $115,925 per year, or $579,625 in extra spending over five years. It also recommended another $95,590 in one-time costs, yielding a bottom line–after netting out savings vs. added costs–of $362,215 in additional school spending.
The results were no comfort to those hoping the efficiency review would provide some solutions to the worsening budget bind that the School Board faces.
“Everybody’s looking for the silver bullet to streamline us” to save money, commented School Board member Wes Mills of Jackson District, in a brief question period after the presentation. “What I see here is a recommendation that to be more efficient, we need to spend more money. That’s the main take-away I get from this. I realize this is not great news to those who came looking for a silver bullet.”
Three members of the county’s Board of Supervisors were in the audience of about 40 persons, which included all five School Board members, several school administrators, and Rappahannock residents. After the presentation, two of the three supervisors privately expressed disappointment that the report held relatively little promise of major savings.
Most such efficiency reviews do produce recommendations for net savings rather than net spending, said a state official who oversees Virginia’s school efficiency review program.
John Ringer, of the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget, said 30 such efficiency reviews have been conducted in the state. “Yours is the third or fourth one where we get to this point and there are additional costs” rather than net savings, he told the meeting. The Rappahannock school system appears to be operating “pretty efficiently already,” offering fewer targets for obvious savings, he said.
The report provides findings and recommendations in eight areas of school operations: Division administration, financial management and purchasing, cost of educational services delivery, human resources and personnel management, transportation, facility use and management, technology management, and food services.
The report did not provide any evaluation of the quality of education provided by the county schools. The focus was on operations, facilities, staffing, financial management and administration.
The object of the exercise, the report states, “is to identify ways in which RCPS could realize cost savings in non-instructional areas in order to redirect those funds toward classroom activities.” However, the findings and recommendations added up to the opposite: more spending, no net savings.
The report recommended a number of steps with one-time costs. These would be non-recurring expenditures, including: Purchasing fireproof file cabinets for central office records ($3,970); purchasing two dry storage buildings for equipment and supplies ($11,720); creating and implementing a “Disaster Recovery Plan” to protect all electronic data from being wiped out ($45,000); purchasing a used van for food transfer to the high school after consolidating food preparation in the elementary school ($15,000). These and other one-time costs tallied up to $95,590.
Other recommended actions would have ongoing, year-after-year costs. These fall primarily in the transportation category–school busing.
The report recommends speeding up replacement bus purchases to two buses per year from one per year, at an additional cost of $75,000 per year or $375,000 over five years. This is aimed at renewing an aging bus fleet; the consultants recommend that School Board adopt a policy to replace each bus every 10 years. No such policy exists now.
Currently, RCPS has 14 buses that now are more than 10 years old, MGT found. The school division has eight spare buses, it said, which is more than needed; it recommended selling three spare buses, netting $6,000 in total savings.
As for potential cost savings, the report pointed to two areas with the most promise: changes in the schools’ food services, and developing staffing plans keyed to recent and likely future declines in enrollment.
Savings of $71,875 over a five-year period are possible through changes in food services provided by the schools, according to the report, which was critical of food-service management, operations, outdated equipment, high per-pupil costs and perceived unappealing quality of meals provided. The meals program has racked up losses totaling $93,087 in the past five years, it reported.
The report made wide-ranging recommendations for changing the food services, which will be detailed in a subsequent article.
Potentially the most significant findings and recommendations of the report relate to school staffing levels. The consultants found that “the school division does not have a comprehensive staffing plan on which to base personnel decisions in light of declining student enrollment,” and that “there is no comprehensive plan with standards for adjusting staffing levels, or justifying existing staffing levels.”
Its key recommendation was: “Create an enrollment-based comprehensive staffing plan and make staffing reductions based on that plan.”
The report did not recommend any specific job cuts. It found that the teacher-to-student ratio in the high school is one teacher to 12 students, and in the elementary school, one teacher to 10 students.
In summary, it said: “The current instructional staff to student ratio in RCPS is 1:11. While this ratio does not mean that every classroom in the school division has only 11 students, it does represent a higher-than-average staffing level given the total number of students enrolled in the division.”
The report could not estimate the savings that could be made through staff reductions. It said “there may be a determination of need to reduce current levels of staffing….Such a determination would result in savings equal to the salaries and benefits of each of the affected positions.”
Another future article will examine staffing levels and the reports findings and recommendations in more detail.
The report also commended the Rappahannock schools for “exemplary practices” in a wide range of areas, including: containing costs for legal services; good communications with staff, students and public; “rigor and relevance in courses;” effective health, social and psychological services; a welcoming atmosphere for new students; mainstreaming special education students; clean facilities and grounds; and working with the Headwaters Foundation on grants for equipment and programs.
-- James P. Gannon
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