Hamilton County: School’s finance advisory committee split in half

There were too many opinions and too little time at Tuesday’s Hamilton County Board of Education Finance Committee meeting, so officials decided to split the group in two.

A citizen advisory panel — a 20-member subgroup of the Finance Committee — now will be divided in half, with one group studying the school system’s overall budget and the other developing recommendations for school consolidations.

“We all want to speak our minds, so we need to split it up,” said board member and Finance Committee Chairwoman Linda Mosley. “We’ll cover a lot more ground that way.”

There were plenty of opinions Tuesday on the often-contentious issue of school closings. The district’s chief financial officer, Tommy Kranz, gave committee members a presentation showing that Hamilton County’s building utilization is just more than 75 percent — nearly 10 percent lower than is ideal, he said.

Small schools that are under capacity are one of the reasons the school system is facing a $20.2 million projected deficit for next year’s budget, Mr. Kranz has said.

The easiest course of action would involve sharing the pain among all areas of the county, said advisory panel member Kurt Faires.

“Why not just go around to each of the nine districts and start closing the lowest-capacity school?” he asked.

Officials must be careful that they don’t close schools arbitrarily, said Superintendent Jim Scales, since neighborhoods and communities often are built up around them.

It is easy to say mathematically that a certain number of schools need to be closed for the school system’s overall building capacity to increase, but combining schools often requires extra money to build a larger cafeteria or parking lot, Mr. Kranz said.