Budget Concerns Percolate at Friday Morning’s ‘Coffee Talk’

‘Zero-Based Budgeting, Man’

Dr. Lawrence C. Korchnak, superintendent of the , was visibly frustrated at his informal Friday morning “Coffee Talk” as he explained some of the budget challenges facing his district.

“This year, we’re losing $1.5 million,” Korchnak said. “(The state’s current) administration is one that is not a friend of education … The governor, the house and the senate are going to just wreak havoc on public schools.”

He went on to say that the Baldwin-Whitehall School District’s residents were lucky to be in a district with a healthy, balanced budget.

“We’re able to (balance our budget) without cutting programs,” Korchnak said, sharing the following ways that the school district has achieved this:

• Running school buses at 70-to-75-percent capacity instead of the previous 66-percent practice (saving $95,000),
• Eliminating University of Pittsburgh interns ($60,000),
• Reviewing school clubs and evaluating their relative value ($100,000),
• Modifying tutoring ($110,000),
• Reducing the district’s number of substitute teachers ($163,000) and
• Three retirements ($170,000).

In addition to those proposed cuts, Korchnak said that he had “two more pages of possibilities” that the B-W school board has not yet seen.

On the topic of clubs, he emphasized that, while he has not made decisions on where cuts will specifically come from, he will be meeting with the leaders of each extracurricular activity to hear their cases.

“What you’re going to do is put Mr. (Gregory) Steele (the band director) and the football coach and others in a position of being a salesman,” said Jerry Pantone, a father of two students in the district. “They’re going to all do their best job to tell you to keep their people.”

“Good!” Korchnak replied. “It’s called zero-based budgeting, man. They have to justify it.”

Running a ‘Hybrid’ ... Food Service

Another issue raised by Pantone was the fact that the school district’s food service has been running at a loss.

“It has been running at a loss ever since they (ARAMARK) came here,” Korchnak confirmed. Korchnak explained that ARAMARK provides a “range of services, not just food. So, we were supposed to have a savings through large purchases.”

In recent years, however, Korchnak has come to believe that it is more profitable to drop the company and “run it ourselves and buy from a food consortium.”

In addition to the cost-ineffectiveness, there are management issues that arise from using a middle-man company like ARAMARK.

“We have a new manager, who, according to the contract, is not able to manage or to discipline employees,” Korchnak said. “Unless those people in our food services are part of ARAMARK, they have no authority over them.”

“We hire them. We train them,” Pantone said. “But we have no authority over them?”

“I know; it’s confusing,” Korchnak replied.

“No, it’s silly,” Pantone countered.

Korchnak said that it is better to have a food service completely managed by either a company (like ARAMARK) or a school district.

“Right now, we have a hybrid,” Korchnak said.

‘Treading Water’

Some of the mothers present at Korchnak’s “Coffee Talk” had questions about what was being done for students who sometimes get passed over.

“We talk about kids who don’t graduate and kids with disability problems,” Desi Dinova said, “but I want to draw your attention to kids who actually get enough support at home, who want to learn more and who want to achieve more academically. What do you do for them?”

Referring to the last available Pennsylvania System of School Assessment results, Dinova pointed out that Baldwin-Whitehall’s scores were less than ideal.

“Last year, we didn’t do as well on the PSSA scores,” Korchnak said. “We only advanced proficiency in 11 of the 20 tested categories, and that’s not good.”

Efforts to improve these scores have included modifying tutoring at the district’s secondary and elementary levels and putting test scores on permanent records.

“What we’ve been doing is maintaining,” Korchnak said. “We’ve been sustaining a level. It’s like treading water when other people are swimming away.”

Avoiding ‘Wonderland’

Voicing a complaint directly related to the PSSA scores, Pantone said, “My big concern … is classroom instruction. It seems that when the PSSAs are going on, whether it be the high school or the elementary school, one thing that’s not happening at all is classroom instruction.”

Korchnak agreed that “there is more instruction time wasted than I can believe in our schools,” and he said that the district is working on dealing with that problem. However, he shared that teacher contracts “do tie our hands with the number of periods we can ask them to teach and what we can ask them to do outside the school day.”

Pantone claimed that instruction time has also been lost due to teachers being unavailable because of various conferences.

“That, too, is contractual,” Korchnak said.

Several mothers who were present added that, even when teachers are in their classrooms, they often are on their computers or text-messaging during class.

“It happens every day,” said one mother. “It’s gone on for years.”

One father asked if the prohibition of cell-phone use could be put into the teachers’ contracts. Korchnak dismissed this idea, saying that the more you put into contracts, the more that things are open to interpretation.

“‘What do words mean?’ Remember ‘Alice in Wonderland’?” Korchnak asked. “‘A word means what I choose it to mean.’”

An Equal Playing Field

Korchnak expressed his dismay at the state’s decision to approve a new charter school in (the ) against the district’s wishes and at the taxpayer’s expense.

“It was noble to begin with,” Korchnak said. “I supported (charter schools) back when I was a middle-school principal.

“I love school choice, but I want to be matched against somebody who is run by the same rules.”

Korchnak also handed out a letter to the “Coffee Talk” attendants that he had written to state government officials in protest of Senate Bill 1, a “voucher bill.”

The letter, written “as a citizen and taxpayer,” claims that the bill “allows private religious schools to take state funding while continuing to pick and choose their students. This leads to elitism while excluding most students with disabilities.”

One mother in attendance pointed out that there seems to be no accountability for charter and private schools.

“They don’t even have to take the PSSA,” Korchnak said.

You can read Korchnak’s letter below the photo gallery toward the top of this page.