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Although the Alamance County Board of Commissioners came close to matching the budget request for the Alamance-Burlington School System, there remains a gap that ABSS officials will have to work to close, the system’s interim superintendent said.
ABSS is about $800,000 from filling the gap between county appropriations and the ABSS request, Interim Superintendent Bill Harrison told the Alamance-Burlington Board of Education Monday night.
The commissioners appropriated $54.3 million for ABSS last week, $4.8 million below what the school board requested, but also reallocated technology expenses to capital outlay and made other changes that helped narrow the gap, he said.
Some possible ways he said officials could close the remaining gap:
• Eliminating some currently vacant student services jobs. Currently there are three vacancies, but it would take 11 to close the full gap.
• Central Services position cuts could save $200,000.
• Reducing the number of school resource officers or reducing the length of their contract. Currently ABSS funds SROs at $75,000 per position and has one officer in each elementary school. Cutting the number of SROs in half would save $750,000. Keeping the same number of SROs but reducing the positions to 10 months of employment, similar to teachers, would save $500,000.
Harrison also warned that the N.C. House of Representatives’ current bill to adjust the two-year state budget that was approved last year would add new teacher pay raises beyond what was approved last year. That could require ABSS to make its own pay adjustments that are not currently in the budget, he said.
The N.C. Senate opposes adding new raises for teachers and other state employees beyond what was approved last year. The two chambers are at an impasse and unlikely to pass any budget adjustment bill soon.
In other business, the school board approved increasing fees for online records requests to cover the costs. There has been no increase in these fees since 2013.
