Charles City Community School District faces job cuts

(ABC 6 NEWS) – $750,000. That’s the amount of money the Charles City Community School District needs in cost savings to bounce back after declining enrollment and other issues affecting the district.

The district is down 64 students from last year.

Superintendent of Charles City Community Schools Anne Lundquist says the district needs to be fiscally responsible to go into the next year with a balanced budget. She says the budget needs to get on track and they need to increase enrollment so they can enhance their spending authority in the future.

In response to this, the school board will plan reductions throughout the district.

To start, their plan includes reduction in the operations department, central services office staff and a few other positions.

Superintendent Lundquist says this can be seen as bus route adjustments to help the district save money and reclassifying staff members such as library staff to adjust their workloads to help the district in cost savings.

Summer workers would be eliminated and the part time position for the director of communications.

And the most controversial option of course, two full time certified positions.

Board members will vote on this Monday evening.

They are #1) Reduce two music teachers.

#2) Reduce one music teacher and one English teacher at the high school.

#3) Reduce one music teacher and the assistant principal at the high school.

“I’m very confident that we can weather this storm and that our board will get through this and make good decisions. In these times of shrinking enrollments it’s necessary to be fiscally responsible and make some of these tough decisions. Charles City is not alone, many districts throughout the state are losing students, in fact, a majority of rural districts are in this same position,” Superintendent Lundquist said.

Again, not an easy decision for the district.

These positions were chosen because Superintendent Lundquist says it will have the least amount of impact to students.

The board will meet to discuss all of this Monday evening in the high school library.