WEBER CITY — Scott County’s Head Start program has been forced to cut its 2012-13 school year short by nearly 10 days and close one of its classrooms next year to help deal with funding cuts caused by sequestration.
Student enrollment numbers for the coming school year will also be reduced by more than a dozen due to the loss of money.
Scott County Head Start Director Helen Henderson said the program has been forced to make several tough choices for this school year and beyond in order to deal with the loss of thousands of dollars that stems from sequestration.
“It’s applicable to fiscal year 2013, which is what we’re already in the middle of,” Henderson said. “We had to go ahead and make the cuts based on the five percent. So we’re looking at a little over $62,000 that we have to come up with.”
The decision to reduce the number of days in class was made so the program could begin saving immediately, Henderson said.
“We had 174 days built into the calendar, and we’re mandated to provide 160 days for our classroom program, and we will have done that when we cut the 10 days off of this year,” Henderson added. “The feds even said they understood if programs couldn’t reach that mandated 160 days because it just happened to us. We’ve just got to deal with it whatever the effects are.”
Employees will not be paid for the 10 days that are being eliminated.
Although the shorter school year will help close the budget gap, Henderson said the main cost saving measure won’t be implemented until next year.
The effort to save money will include the layoff of two staff members.
“Salary and fringe benefits are the biggest expense we have anyway on 29 people, so we looked at where we could get the most of that,” Henderson said. “We also had to do it prior to July 1, because we would have to enter into contracts again.
Henderson said eliminating those positions means Head Start will have to discontinue classes at its Weber City facility until the funding is restored, if it ever is.
“The only way that we could get (the savings) was to close one of our classrooms,” Henderson said. “So that means a teacher and a teacher’s assistant have been cut. It won’t be effective this school year because we’re trying to not disrupt services to kids this year.”
While closing classes at Weber City won’t impact students already enrolled, Henderson said it will cause numbers to drop next school year.
“By closing that classroom we’re cutting our enrollment from 173 this year to 160 next year,” Henderson said. “So that’s 13 slots, and that’s 13 Scott County families that will not have the opportunity to get their families in Head Start, and that’s not good. We don’t have any fat in the program to cut personnel without closing a classroom. It takes everyone we’ve got.”
Head Start will retain ownership of the Weber City facility, Henderson said, and the program’s eight remaining classes will continue to operate next school year.
Henderson said the personnel reductions reflect the downside of only receiving funds from the federal government.
“Our contracts are dependent on federal funds, so there’s not a lot of security having a teacher’s job at Head Start, even though we’re with the school system,” Henderson said. “We have our own salary scale, and we don’t receive any funds from the county or from the state, or from the school system itself.”
Head Start’s budget for the current fiscal year was $1.5 million, which included $1.2 million in federal funding and a 20 percent local match of roughly $310,000.
While it doesn’t provide direct funding, Henderson said the school system does assist Head Start in meeting that local match requirement for federal money.