Center continued on A4
By Steven Matthews
Staff Writer
Public schools facing shrinking budgets should consider sharing more services with other districts to cut costs, local education experts say.
Education is expected to be a big part of Gov. John Kasich’s State of the State address Tuesday as he gives it from a Steubenville school in eastern Ohio, but local officials don’t expect an announcement of increased funding from the state to come.
Without increased revenues, school districts will be forced to make cuts in costs. An examination by the JournalNews found some local schools are sharing services to cut costs.
Some advocates say more could be shared to save taxpayers’ money.
The Middletown School District contracts with the Butler County Educational Service Center to run its early childhood preschool program. Officials said the recent partnership has saved the district $200,000 this school year.
Lakota schools do not contract with the center for preschool services, but are considering a partnership that could save the district more than $1 million.
“My belief, and our practice has been, is that we are the central resource for schools and the community,” BCESC Superintendent Jon Graft said. “All of the districts in Butler County do an excellent job at working to share resources and partnering with us to offset the cost of local dollars.”
Butler County Educational Service Center provides education programs and professional development to all 10 school districts in the county.
The BCESC’s annual budget is $27 million — a little more than $1 million from state funding and the remaining $26 million from grants and contracted services.
The BCESC’s two largest partnerships are with Fairfield City Schools (technology personnel) and Middletown City Schools (early childhood preschool) in which BCESC employees fulfill their responsibilities within their assigned district.
Fairfield employs six IT people through BCESC that cost $424,000 annually.
“The BCESC is a great resource for all of the schools in the area,” said Jeff McKinney, a systems administrator strictly for Fairfield. “They get a great pool of candidates of highly-trained and highly-specialized people that can fulfill any service that a district may need. We can be shared among schools or we can be assigned directly to one district. It also gives us the ability to talk with other districts that are dealing with similar problems, and we can pull our resources together.”
In years past, Middletown managed its early childhood preschool program in its three buildings, and BCESC did the same at the Early Learning Center on First Avenue.
This year, the BCESC took over the programs at Amanda, Creekview and Rosa Parks elementaries, and the district saw an enrollment increase of 70 students.
“The beauty of shared services is you’ve got to find ways to leverage resources and reduce costs without reducing the quality of programs we have,” Middletown Superintendent Greg Rasmussen said. “And it’s our job to balance that.”
The early childhood preschool program at Middletown has 11 classrooms at its disposal, along with 11 classroom teachers, seven intervention specialists, 10 instructional assistants, a speech therapist and two administrators. About 370 students ages 3 to 5 are in the half-day program.
“When times get tough, people look at collaborations and how they can maximize their own dollar to benefit the greater good and maintain quality service,” third-year BCESC early childhood programs principal Carrie Corder said. “We here give a quality education.”
Staring at a $9 million deficit for next school year as a result of three rejected levies in an 18-month span, the Lakota Local School District has proposed a partnership with the BCESC in regards to its preschool program, a restructuring that would save an estimated $1.2 million.
Lakota, as well as other districts like Hamilton, has utilized BCESC’s professional development aspect, including districts sharing the cost to bring in a guest speaker. Lakota also has partnered with the Hamilton County ESC and Warren County ESC in the past, assistant superintendent Ron Spurlock said.
“School districts, like businesses, like our families, are looking at everything we do right now,” Spurlock said. “There are certainly some benefits to sharing services. All school districts will take advantage of shared services more down the road. I think you’re almost forced to.”
The Warren County Education Service Center has proposed creating a centralized substitute teacher pool that would ultimately schedule and provide substitute teachers to the nine school districts in Warren County that the ESC serves.
Warren County officials said they believe it will save districts money.
Monroe schools share a bus mechanic with the Madison school district. Madison’s buses are brought to Monroe, and in return, Petermann takes the cost off its contract with Monroe to compensate Monroe for using the district’s bus garage.
The cost for Monroe to share a truant officer with Lakota is $8,000 a year, while sharing a psychologist has an annual cost of $33,129.60 (two days per week) and $66,259.20 (four days per week).
“It helps us a great deal,” Monroe Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli said. “We are a smaller school, and when we team up with other small schools in the county, we all save. If we didn’t team up, we’d likely reduce those services in those areas or have no service at all in those areas.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 755-5113 or steven.matthews@coxinc.com.