Durham schools seek more money from the county, despite declining enrollment.

The Durham Public Schools system is asking Durham County for $13 million more in local funding for next school year, despite years of declining enrollment.

The proposed budget, available on the DPS website, asks for $8.25 million more in operating money, a little over a 6 percent increase, in part to help implement Superintendent Pascal Mubenga’s strategic plan. DPS funded work on the plan this school year with about $8 million from its fund balance, according to Chief Financial Officer Paul D. LeSieur.

The district had planned to ask for only $1 million more in capital funding, but the Board of Education asked for the request to be raised to over $4 million. For over a decade, the county has given the school district $1.37 million per year for capital appropriations, or facility needs like repairing roofs, windows and carpets, and the board is hoping for a total of $6 million from the county for next year.

Operating increases

The largest portion of the $8.25 million DPS wants to add to the operating budget will go to increasing the local supplement added to teachers’ and some other staff members’ state salaries. The district is asking for $3 million to increase supplements the next two years.

DPS already pays teachers more than they would earn in some districts, but it is still losing teachers to the Wake and Chapel Hill-Carrboro school systems, which offer some of the highest salaries in the state. DPS, which is the third largest employer in Durham County, had the highest teacher attrition rate of the three counties, losing nearly 1 in 5 teachers last year.

Teacher retention is about more than just numbers, LeSieur said. Keeping the same teachers in the classroom ensures continuity and consistency and reduces the need for the district to train new teachers over and over again.

“We can mold them into the Durham model,” LeSieur said.

The district is also looking for $1.5 million in new operating money to set minimum pay for positions like teacher assistants, custodians, cafeteria workers, groundskeepers to $13.35 per hour.

Another $2.6 million of the operating budget increase would go to academic support. The district hopes to use this money to add assistant principals to some schools, ensure that all middle schools and large high schools have a restorative-practice coordinator, increase funding for professional development and support students learning English.

The district has already begun pursuing many of these changes but says it cannot continue to pay for them with the district’s fund balance.

“We’re not building spas”

For more than a decade, the county has given DPS $1.37 million for capital spending. Before the recession, the county gave more.

The budget request notes DPS consists of “six million square feet of building space across 53 schools and five office buildings.”

The request reports that the current amount breaks down to $23,620 per facility, “not enough to cover carpet replacement, or painting, or any number of other basic capital needs to maintain facilities in a state of good repair.”

“We’re not building spas in these buildings,” said Steve Unruhe, vice chair of the school board. “This is to paint them and clean them, and it’s simply embarrassing.”

Fewer students, higher costs?

DPS has been losing students to charter schools for a few years and expects to lose another 300 next year.

There are currently two virtual and 15 brick and mortar charter schools in Durham, and Discovery Charter plans to open next year.

Last year, County Manager Wendell Davis wrote a letter to the county commissioners recommending they only grant part of district’s $5 million new money request because DPS was losing students.

But LeSieur says the budget request is about the quality of instruction, not the number of students.

Board Chair Mike Lee expressed his frustration with the county “moving goal posts.” When he joined the board, Lee said, the county didn’t want to give the district more money because grades were too low. Today, the conversation is about the number of students.

“We’ve made some really good improvements,” Lee said of student test scores. “That’s not arguably, that’s actually improving. And since that improvement, we haven’t heard anything about those. What we’re hearing is, ‘you’re not growing.’”

“Maybe we can stop the bleeding if we’re funded where we need to be,” Lee said.

Budget cuts

The budget request also includes $500,000 for deep cleaning schools this summer before students return, over $3 million in state mandated salary and benefit increases for some locally funded staff, a $100,000 increase in the amount the district pays to charter schools based on projected enrollment, and a $280,000 increase to fixed costs such as utilities.

But, the district is cutting $2.8 million from departmental budgets, open positions, and lapsed salary appropriations to offset some of these.

LeSieur said some of these cuts will be controversial.

“I do want to point out that we do have a $250,000 reduction in supplies and materials to the schools to make this balance,” LeSieur told the school board. “One of the things I do want people to understand is that we spend probably three times more for supplies and materials in Durham Public Schools than most districts do across the state.”

Board member Matt Sears said funding for supplies and materials was already an issue.

“We fund our schools well in supplies, but do our schools know that we fund them well? That’s rhetorical,” Sears said. “The single biggest thing we get dinged on in PR is teachers begging the community for supplies and parents coming to us saying what the heck is going on.”

“If the money is there and you tell us it’s there, how do we communicate that to schools and teachers?” Sears said.

This story was originally published March 29, 2019 at 1:01 PM with the headline "Durham schools seek more money from the county, despite declining enrollment.."