MOUNT OLIVET | The report is in, and Robertson County School District has been identified as a state assisted district by the Kentucky Department of Education.
According to the report, “… management audit team recommends Robertson County School District become a state assisted district as a result of the existence of a pattern of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in multiple areas. The local board is supportive of improvement and wants to adequately address such concerns, but feels it needs some outside help to do so effectively. State management should still be considered if the local board fails to act promptly to improve governance and create a sense of urgency and responsiveness starting at the superintendent level in the near future.”
“It is pretty much what we expected,” said RCS Superintendent Chuck Brown on Friday.
Following months of fiscal and operational scrutiny, changes, losses, and revamping of communications between the administration and school board, KDE has recommended continued monitoring of RCS operations.
“It will be in an assistance role, much like we have been doing this year, not a management role,” Brown said. “(KDE representative) Kay Kennedy will be coming to board meetings.”
The process of getting an acceptable budget submitted and getting control of spending has been a learning experience for the school, he said.
Just to end 2012-2013 within budget, cuts included language arts conversion to online instruction, loss of music and art class instructors, and more than 16 changes in staffing through contract changes resulting in loss of instructors or services.
“I have been here 18 years and kept doing things the way they were done when I started,” Brown said. “That was fine as long as things were going good, but when they weren’t, we had to do something different. KDE helped us with that.”
According to comments from the KDE committee report, “In general, communication has been lacking and the district has relied on trust to get the work done with few transparent written procedures established to make it happen. The community, board, administrators and teachers want the situation to be better. They are frustrated and want to know what is happening and how leadership is addressing the financial woes. They have all been told to do with less. It is clear that many of those same stakeholders want to provide the leadership necessary if they just knew what to do. From interviews the superintendent believes he is doing what is expected of him and does not demonstrate a sense of urgency to all stakeholders.”
Brown also realized he had to have more communication with board members, he said.
“It wasn’t like we were hiding anything. We just had to do better at being informed and acting accordingly,” Brown said.
Most of the funding to operate RCS comes from out-of-county sources like Support Education Excellence in Kentucky funding.
Because SEEK funding is based on school average daily attendance and RCS experienced drastic drops in enrollment in the last three to four years, which also lowered the ADA, funding was reduced.
Brown admitted in earlier school meetings, there should have been staffing adjustments and cuts as this was happening, but he was optimistic about enrollment making an upturn.
“When that didn’t happen, it hurt us,” Brown said.
Before the decline, there were more than 400 students in the kindergarten through high school facility at one point, Brown said.
As of Friday, enrollment figures were up, with 365 students accounted for, which should increase the ADA to around 325, Brown said, “They have a formula, like kindergarten only counts as half.”
Last year KDE used an ADA of 304 to calculate SEEK funding.
“We should be in better shape this year,” Brown said.
The ADA last year set the funding in the 2013-2014 budget. Whatever the ADA number is in the middle of October will set the count for the 2014-2015 school year, Brown said.
“Things are going good now,” Brown said.
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