With the St. Joseph School District still working on balancing the 2018-2019 budget, more decisions were made at Monday night’s Board of Education meeting.

One decision included approving a reallocation of preschool funds.

Board member Kappy Hodges said the decision had to do partly with an anticipated shortcoming in Title I funding from the federal government for next year.

“That would mean that we have to make do with less Title I money for the school district and we use it for, not just the K through 8 classes with schools and students that qualify for the Title 1 funding, but also for the preschools at this time,” Hodges said. “There have been some schools that have qualified now as Title I schools, so they need to be covered with services also. So we’re having to make the money that we have, which is likely going to be a little less, cover extra schools too and that puts us in a bad situation for trying to stretch it across everything. So administration has recommended that we pare back the preschool offerings.”  

School District Superintendent Dr. Robert Newhart said the recommendation was to pare down to 13.

“Nobody is going to argue the importance of preschool if we can get it funded. Our primary responsibility is our K-8 programs, we’re actually going to be serving, now, a little over 900 more students than what we would with the preschool allocations at the K-8 level,” Newhart said. “But somewhere here along the line, the district and the community has got to decide how important is the preschool, we believe it is very important, but you have to have funding for it. It would have been a tune of approximately three-quarters of a million dollars to locally fund it to keep it as is.”

Hodges, was one of two who voted no.

“In my opinion, we should have gone ahead and tried to do it anyway and found space in some way,” Hodges said. “The benefits to educating the children, especially in a city where you have a very large population of people who qualify for free and reduced lunch and have that lower socioeconomic level, those kids frequently need a little extra help before they enter kindergarten. I totally understand the situation that the administration presented, I just really wanted to see that continue for the kids I thought would lose out.”

Hodges adds that the Title I funding hasn’t been fully determined yet, so there’s a possibility to add back in some preschools in the future.

Other decisions made Monday night included rearranging within the Parents as Teachers program. The Board also voted to cap funding for the program to save the district $100,000.

Pay-to-play is another item that is part of the budget discussions. According to Dr. Newhart, the district spends approximately $1 million a year on Missouri State High School Activities Association events and sports and fine arts.

“The idea is, to basically help support that, is to ask the families – the parents and the students – to help contribute to offset that cost and to what amount is what is being debated right now by the Board of Education,” Newhart said.

The Board tabled the pay-to-play decision at the meeting and Newhart said administration was asked to come back with additional supporting figures.

The Board of Education meets next on March 12th.