Anticipating a statewide budget crisis, Mobile County (Ala.) School Superintendent Harold Dodge has frozen spending on library and instructional supplies, imposed across-the-board budget cuts, threatened 140 teaching jobs, and eliminated extracurricular funds.
An angry teachers union filed a grievance against Dodge January 16, but with the looming prospect of proration—cuts of 3–6% in the $4.3-billion education budget that funds the state’s schools and colleges—school board members are supporting Dodge. The system received in January an A– credit rating from Standard & Poors for construction bonds. “This just says the board is doing a good job managing its finances despite limited resources,” bond counsel Pfil Hunt told the Mobile Register.
Parents say they will launch a grassroots campaign to garner support from state and county legislators. Their own community has been reluctant to back the 66,000-student school system with more tax dollars, most recently defeating a 10-mill tax increase in 1999. The state’s largest school district, Mobile has no operating reserve.
“All we can do is pray and try to do what is very best for kids and hope that the citizens understand that we are really scraping bottom,” said Terrence Mixon, one of 100 Mobile principals directed by Dodge January 24 to make 3% cuts in all their departments. Mixon added that students who need textbooks at his Mayville school will not get them.
Posted January 29, 2001.