TAMPA — Hillsborough County superintendent Addison Davis and his team found themselves playing defense Tuesday morning at a School Board workshop that brought to light the public pushback against planned personnel cuts.
The session was supposed to be about the coronavirus, and its impact on the district’s finances.
See Addison Davis’ PowerPoint here.
Instead, board members acted on a loud chorus of complaints from parents and teachers. Most said they do not want to see school morale plummet in the midst of a frightening pandemic. Some questioned the validity of Davis’ financial presentation. One argued with him about whether he was spending more on executive hires than his predecessor did.
Davis rejected board member Cindy Stuart’s complaints about his calculations, which indicate a $72 million operating deficit that could grow to $128 million if thousands of missing students do not return and the state cuts funding as a result.
“These numbers are realities,” he said.
Steve Cona, the board member most supportive of Davis, insisted the district must be financially prudent and not, for example, transfer money from its capital account to cover negotiated pay raises.
“You’re plugging the hole on bargaining agreements, which is unacceptable,” Cona said.
But he was in the minority. Around the dais, there were calls to abandon the goal of getting the district’s financial reserves up to 5 percent of anticipated revenues, which became district policy after a steep drop in reserves in 2015.
Instead, the members said, Davis should aim for the 3 percent threshold that is state law, and spare schools from painful cuts. A modest correction would be better, member Tamara Shamburger said, than “mutilating the morale of our staff.”
Michael Kemp, the deputy superintendent who worked for Davis previously in Clay County, delivered a string of admonitions throughout the morning.
“You can shoot the messenger, but the message remains the same,” he said.
“Tough decisions have to be made. ... We can’t continue to kick the can down the road. This team, it’s not in our DNA not to address the issues.”
The issue, Kemp and Davis contend, is that Hillsborough has too many teachers and not enough student enrollment to support all of them. The Gibson Consulting Group came to the same conclusion in 2016 after being hired to study the district’s finances.
Going school by school, they have asked principals to reconfigure schedules so classes are not under-enrolled. They said Tuesday that the Council of Great City Schools, an organization of large districts of which Hillsborough is a member, is sending a team to do an efficiency audit for free.
“I am happy to know that we are having the financial audit,” board member Stacy Hahn said. “Even happier that we are not paying for that audit.”
But Hahn was the first to push back against cuts that, so far, Kemp has been discussing with the board members individually.
“I have lots of colleagues who are teachers,” Hahn said. “They are suffering right now, they really are.”
Hahn, Shamburger and Lynn Gray said they are concerned about morale at a time when 7,300 students have left the system — not including the more than 30,000 who are in privately run charter schools. Those charter school departures could cost the district close to $250 million this year, as money follows the children.
School employees have been placing calls to track down the missing 7,300. It is believed that 3,000 are being home-schooled because of the coronavirus. They may or may not return mid-year, when the state will perform an important calculation for funding purposes.
That brings student enrollment down to 215,000 and, excluding the charter students, closer to 185,000.
Yet, according to Kemp, the district spends money as if it taught 225,000 students.
Kemp reminded the board members more than once that, in his one-on-one meetings with them, he made it clear that the cutting would be an 18-month to two-year process.
They are expecting a large number of teachers and parents at today’s 4 p.m. business meeting who fear the district will slash items such as International Baccalaureate and arts programs. On social media, music and art teachers have mobilized.
Addressing teachers at a bargaining session on Monday, Chief of Staff Michael McAuley said no decisions have been made yet. In fact, he said, Davis is combing through the proposed changes, school by school, and in some cases overriding the principals' suggestions for cuts.
In recent days, Davis has sent out emails insisting he does not intend to eliminate art or music. He made that promise at Tuesday’s meeting as well, saying twice that, as a student, he sang in an ensemble.
Some board members said the district has not done a good enough job communicating its plan. Stuart suggested the numbers on Davis’ slide show are exaggerated. Money lost to charter schools should not have been included in the deficit calculations, she said. “We approved those contracts,” she said.
Several did not like seeing the word “deficit” at all, saying it was too frightening.
“The community has a lot on their plate, and they’ve got a lot of time on their hands to sit around and talk about this,” Stuart said. “Our secretaries are losing their mind on the second floor.”
Board member Karen Perez asked pointed questions of Davis about salaries he is paying his executive team, who are largely from Clay and Duval counties, and how they compare to their predecessors under former superintendent Jeff Eakins.
The two went back and forth. Perez said executive payroll has increased by about $760,000, while Davis said it has not. He said the people he hired are earning what they are worth. And Davis said he saved $7.5 million early on by phasing out many jobs in the district bureaucracy.
Perez also grilled Davis on money spent to renovate the downtown headquarters, which Davis described as “a sickly building.”
And there were references to Achieve 3000, the educational software company that employs Davis’ brother, and which now has a $3.6 million annual contract with the district. While Davis and the district’s attorneys said there was no conflict in the deal, critics return to it frequently on social media.
Cona, who ran the workshop in the absence of chairwoman Melissa Snively, adjourned on schedule at 11:30 a.m., saying there will be time for more discussion at the 4 p.m. business meeting.
The agenda includes acceptance of a $100 million line of credit from Wells Fargo Bank, in case there is a delay in property tax receipts and the district runs short on cash for payroll. This is a standard practice and the district has never had to use the line of credit, according to chief financial officer Gretchen Saunders.
But, under the current circumstances with the pandemic, she could not guarantee that will not happen this year.
The Times will live-tweet the 4 p.m. meeting and will update this report after it concludes.
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