DALTON, Ga. — Dalton Public Schools Superintendent Jim Hawkins says his school system is facing the daunting task of trimming the 2011-2012 fiscal year budget by $6 million and has only further cuts to look forward to this year.
School employees joined together to reduce costs by $5 million last year, and this year, a three-day staff reduction mandate will be accomplished by clipping a professional development day and a student day, and offsetting another with a snow day, Mr. Hawkins said.
A silver lining is that the system continues marked achievement, the second year superintendent said.
Q: How has the school system dealt with cuts in state funding?
A: In a word, together. It’s been a collaborative effort. There’s been shortfalls at both the state and local level and the way we’ve approached that is we’ve developed a three-year budget reduction plan. I came in January of … 2008. We’ve put into place an opportunity for all employees to have input into that plan. This just didn’t start this round; we started last year. We’re continuing to involve employees through some budget study teams. Last year, it was about surveys and having meetings and people sending in pieces of paper in responding to surveys. Out of last year’s discussions, we made the reductions that seemed to make sense; that were easiest to make. That added up to about $5 million reduction in budgeted expenditures last year and into this year. But we also had some ideas that came out of that employee input that we needed to study further. I think there were 10 or 12 topics, and we combined some and we ended up with six study teams; some of them very focused.
One group was about facilities and utilities, there was one was on transportation. Their charge was to get really deep and be an expert and learn what we have to do, learn what we have some control over. Basically, it was to have someone to counsel me on that particular topic.
They’re beginning to come up with some suggestions for what I call a “dial down.” I’m not finding anything that we’re doing that’s wrong. But if you don’t have enough money, you have to live within your means. The mental model I’ve used, or the metaphor, is it’s like you’ve got a dial and you’ve got to click it down. So their charge was to identify activities or things we can not do and then associate an amount of money with it. They’re the experts, so you come up with the clicks on the dial. Through this effort they’ve also said we might need to put some of these on “pause” until things get better.
What I think is important for people to know is that this year every employee in the district … everyone took a pay deduction, if you will, and we had guiding principals that helped influence. We wanted to be true to our guiding principals which were to minimize classroom impact, to preserve employment and then to maintain the dollars needed for cash flow. In other words, we had to keep our fund balance up; we couldn’t spend more money than we actually had. (Considering) the $5 million we saved in fiscal year ’09 and ’10, and now what’s come out from the state and we’ve got local reduction in property values, locally, which contributes to that, our forecast is that we’re going to have to reduce budgeted expenditures by $6 million in fiscal year ’11 and ’12. There’s a lot of things going there. There won’t be the federal stabilization money through the state, the ARRA — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money — will be gone. We’ve got free port exemption, locally, which is a really good idea, but it does affect our bottom line.
So taking all that into account, quite honestly, we have made sufficient reductions and people have taken it so seriously, they haven’t spent all of their budgets. They’ve looked for ways to cut even beyond what we’ve reduced the expenditure budgets.
We’ve had to make cuts since January. Employees — teachers in particular, those that are 190-day employees — will take an equivalent of three days reduction. We’ll be reducing the calendar, taking one of the weather days that we had the beginning of January, taking a staff development day and actually taking a student day that we will not have school, and that will translate into about $650,000 savings for this year.
Those ideas — the way to do that, which days to take — all bubbled up through a study team. In that particular one, we had two teams. One was a calendar or time team and the compensation team. Those were some ideas of how to do that and how we would implement that. So I think that’s evidence (of) how we’re dealing with the cuts in state funding and there’s some local reductions as well. We’re doing it together and collaboratively; not with a hatchet but with a knife with lots of input from staff. And some things are just being put on “pause.” We’re not cutting them out, we’re just saying we’re not going to do that for a while but we don’t want to lose our capacity to bring it back if things get better.
Q: What can the state do to help?
A: They already have in both last year’s reductions and this year’s reductions, the amount of money that the state had to reduce the state budget translated into about 8 or 10 percent for all agencies. And they have not passed that same percentage along to school districts.
I believe that they recognize that education is one of their major reasons for existence, and it’s a major priority. Do we have to take reductions? Yes. But we’re not taking the same cut that a lot of other agencies are taking. In fact, when you look at the percentage of the state budget that’s going to public education, even though we’ve been cut, our percentage of the total has gone up because other agencies have taken more of a cut than we have.
Everyone is doing more with less and we’re no exception. I think you can see the actions locally and at the state level, (education) continues to be a priority … for Georgia and for Dalton. I am absolutely convinced that when the Great Recession, (when) we really pull out of it and the coffers that support the public in terms of tax revenues, we’ll be at the end of that pipeline. I am absolutely positive that that will continue to be a priority and our tax revenues come back up.
I think (lawmakers) actions to date are consistent. They have earned that confidence.
Q: When do you go to the taxpayers?
A: I think our board has said in times like these we’ve got to live within our means. Never say never, but I think right now is it’s just a confidence that it is a priority, has remained a priority and everybody is having to do more with less. At this point, we don’t think that’s appropriate. But in the future, it could be.
I think what’s made it more difficult, looking back, is that our district and other districts have been taking austerity cuts — that’s what they call it in Georgia — since about 2003. Times were pretty good in the economy then. So, when we weren’t in a recession we were being hit with cuts. So, almost every district has making reductions and absorbing it, trying not to effect the classrooms, trying not to affect teachers and salaries. And when it was really serious and it had to be done, there wasn’t any wiggle room.
I think it’s real, it’s serious, and I think they’ve done as good a job as can be expected given what they had. You can second guess pieces but really I don’t. But it’s what they did the six or seven years prior to that. If they’d been keeping up in funding and being responsible then, we would’ve had a little longer to have responded; we would’ve had a little more of a cushion and we wouldn’t have had to have cut so deeply, so quickly. We started out behind when it really got bad. We could have prepared better.
Q: How do Dalton schools perform so well with its high population of economically disadvantaged students?
A: I’m new to the community and I’ve been here about a year … I’ve been trying to figure that out. There’s not a silver bullet. You look for cause and effect. What I’ve discovered is that Dalton has a rich history of excellence and high expectations. It just didn’t happen recently. This has been a part of the culture, locally, for a long time.
I don’t see any indication that that support and that expectation for excellence for all students won’t continue into the future. What I do find in the community and in the school district is that each child is viewed as an individual. It’s not whether they are poor, or whether they’re Hispanic. Each student is an individual. (E)verything we do to build the capacity of the people in professional development is about providing experiences for students that’s customized to them; that speaks to the motives for why they would want to do the work so they can learn the things that we need them to learn. It’s that real customization in … truly viewing students as the customers … for the work that they do at school. I think that has a lot to do with the success. If students are engaged in what they do at school, then they’re going to persist when the work gets hard; they’re a part of this. Again, just like in the budget, I see a sense of family, everything’s together, there’s so much collaboration. There’s a common focus … about the core business; about the work we provide to students. And that’s not since I’ve been here. I was recruited and I came because I share that vision and share that focus. That’s been going on for several years. The board has been very adamant that we continue that focus, and I think we’ve done that and I think that contributes.
Typically, every time a superintendent changes or a board changes if you go in a different direction you can’t really accomplish anything. But that continuity and that persistence in excellence; “Here’s our core business, here’s how we approach school; here’s how we do it the Dalton way” is just very evident. I believe it has paid off.
That’s why I think everyone can take credit. We look at the graduation rates and they’re going up; double-digit increases. We’re in the 80-percents now … and it just keeps going up. Everyone in the district shares responsibility for every student learning at high levels, but also share the credit when it’s successful. It’s parents, it’s community, it’s every teacher and everything they’ve had since they’ve been in school contributes to that. There’s a sense of team and we’re all in this together. It’s about making sure we do it the Dalton way.
Q: What kinds of achievements can you attribute to the system’s approach?
A: The graduation rate is one people look at. We’ve been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as in the top group of districts and they compare to other districts that are similar situations that are like us. Every time you turn around. And it’s not just in academics. It’s in athletics. Last week in the board meeting, we recognized principals and their … cafeteria manager for having high participation in school lunches because we’ve got a big emphasis in wellness … both for staff and students; eating right and exercising right and taking care of yourself. I think it’s a “whole child” approach. Those academics are important, but it’s also those 21 Century skills that students need; being able to work in groups, the ethics, the integrity and the citizenship. All those are important as well. Every time we turn around there’s some award or some recognition, either locally, or the state or national saying, “Yes, we can see that, too.”
Q: What has Dalton learned about excelling with poor students that can be passed on to other systems?
A: It’s both what it is and what it’s not. I think it’s about being clear about what your core business is, what your mission is; focusing on that with passion and not being distracted. It’s about recruiting and inducted very talented people into the organization.
What we don’t do is go look at state regulations and federal regulations and best practices that have happened in other places and go try to import them into our district. We go study them and see what made them work. Then we bring it here and make it ours. You can’t go find a silver bullet.
I’m not saying what we do is the right way to do it, but it’s the right process and the right framework. So if you’re going to do it in your school — I use a lot of Jim Collins’ work in “Good to Great” — you better find out what your “hedgehog” is and you’ve got to find out what your “flywheel” is. If you make it important and you work at it, it’s really interesting how you can get some results. What I would share with other people is the process and the framework, but you’ve got to do it your way.
Don’t look at what we’re doing, but look at why we’re doing it and why it’s working. The “what” has to be customized to that community, to that classroom and to that student.
Q: What impact could the Race to the Top have on Dalton and/or the rest of the region/state?
A: In Race To the Top, in the short term, we’re not really impacted because we’re not participating in the early phases. In the long term, we’ll be following it to see if we can learn from any of the things that come out of that.
In our framework and the way we approach school, we’re not going to start with the compliance stuff first and see how we can do it best. We’re going to try to start with who our folks are and what we think students should know and be able to do and who are our customers. Then we go back and check the compliance boxes. I don’t think you can customize if you start with the laws and the rules first. That was written for everybody.
I guess I would frame Race To The Top as the federal government’s attempt to reform education through No Child Left Behind (and) that is going to be reauthorized as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It’s a federal issue. I think you can tell from all of my comments, it’s about local and it’s about customization. I’m a little leery of some of those kinds of initiatives that are top-down.
What I’m excited about in our community — and it’s an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often — is that through our local Chamber of Commerce we’ve got a local visioning initiative for the community that’s under way. It offers our school district — not just ours but Whitfield County, as well — an opportunity to share a common vision and to be responsive on the local level. The community I believe … is the customer for what students should know and be able to do. They are also the customer for what are they willing to accept as evidence that they are learning those things and that we’re doing a good job.