By Elizabeth Herman
In light of recent budget cutbacks and a defeated referendum that will necessitate the cutting of 11 teachers, the Mequon-Thiensville School district slashed its spending on staff travel by nearly two-thirds, but does not yet have an official policy on employee travel reimbursement unlike most comparable area school districts.
The district, which hopes to have a policy in place by the beginning of the school year in September, reduced its travel expenses, including staff conferences and training sessions, from nearly $40,000 during the 2004-2005 school year to approximately $11,000 during the 2005-2006 school year to date.
According to a Journal-Sentinel report, the district is currently facing a budget deficit between $800,000 and $1.3 million for the upcoming school year.
About half of the $40,000 spent on staff travel during the 2004-2005 school year came from grants rather than the district’s budget, including federal, state and private money. Business assistant Cindy Leinfelder said that the grants allowed the district to supplement in a time of cutbacks.
Since the referendum’s defeat on Feb. 21, the school board has drawn up a budget proposal that attempts to minimize the district’s financial problems for the upcoming school year. Solutions include cutting staff and programs, and raising fees for student parking and athletics.
In addition to the cutting of 11 teachers, two custodians will also be cut, along with one reading specialist. Assistant superintendent Demond Means said, at a school board meeting on Monday May 8, that the district’s alcohol and drug prevention program may also have its funding reduced.
Other cutbacks proposed for the 2006-2007 school year include:
- Nonspecific curriculum reductions
- Increased rental revenue for Range Line School
- Added and increased extracurricular fees
- A special education case worker reduced to half time
- Drug and alcohol prevention coordinator eliminated
- Increased student resource fee
In addition, the school board and administrators are in the process of reviewing a new set of district policies. District superintendent Robert Slotterback said that the district is three-quarters of the way through the process, which he hopes will be finished by the beginning of the school year in September.
One of those policies the board and administrators are reviewing is an official policy on staff travel.
Although no official staff travel policy is in place, Slotterback said that the lack of a policy has not been a problem in his experience.
“Lack of policy doesn’t mean [there is] a lack of procedure,” Slotterback said.
The district pays for its staff’s professional travel, including mileage, lodging, registration costs, incidental expenses, and a maximum of $15 a day for meals. Leinfelder said that all expenses must be pre-approved for staff to get reimbursement.
“Nobody can come and say that it [was] 500 miles instead of 100, or that they decided to spend the night,” Leinfelder said.
According to the district’s educational technology coordinator, Connie Jaeger, conferences are a way of ensuring that the district has all of the information it needs.
“We can’t all be experts on everything, so these are agencies in the state that focus on disseminating information for all of us,” Jaeger said.
Most of the conferences and training sessions attended by staff are in the state. However, some teachers traveled as far away as Florida and Alabama for conferences.
One such conference, held in Auburn, Al, cost approximately $3000, according to Homestead High School science teacher Tracy Grace, who attended with another teacher. Grace said she believed that all of the costs for the trip were covered through grants from the district’s foundation.
Grace and her colleague, Debbie Peck, attended the conference, which taught them to use a radio telescope. Grace said she has since put the knowledge to use in teaching her earth science classes, and hopes to expand the target in the future.
Grace and Peck followed procedures to get reimbursement for their traveling, and Grace submitted a total of three reimbursement request forms.
“We initially bought airline tickets, then the next batch of forms was for receipts, then for some additional charges we put on our own credit cards,” Grace said.
After attending the five-day-long conference and traveling back to Wisconsin the day after, Grace submitted a stack of credit card receipts to the school’s business office. The charges for meals came to almost $224 for the two teachers, an average of more than $18 per day for meals, which is over the district’s limit of $15 a day.
On certain days, the pair charged more than $60 for meals, including a meal at an Italian restaurant in Al for $34. Grace said that she was unaware of the district’s limit on meal spending.
Bruce Duncan, the treasurer of a group called Keep Our Schools-Save Our Homes, a group that opposed the recent referendum, said that the school’s real problem does not lie in smaller expenses like that of staff travel. However, he went on to say that he believes teachers and administrators in the district take too many trips, and that a policy should be in place and budgeted for staff travel.
“There seems to be a lot of non-teaching staff and they take trips to justify their existence,” Duncan said.
Cheryl Rebholz, a member of the Keep Our Schools-Save Our Homes group and a parent who put two children through the Mequon-Thiensville School District believes that the district spent too much on staff travel during the past two school years.
“That money should go into the budget for infrastructure and maintenance, the roof,” Rebholz said. “They need an expense policy, and I want to see the outcome of the conferences they attend. I want to see an outline, and I want to see how it improved the district. I want to see how it affects the student.”