Cloquet signs off on red school budget

Earlier this month, the Cloquet school board approved the budget for the next fiscal year — which officially starts on Monday — showing an anticipated deficit of nearly $331,000 in a $31 million budget, or approximately 1 percent.

Cloquet finance director Candace Nelis said the projected deficit is lower than the $600,000 to $700,000 predicted earlier this spring, after the district made some staffing cuts and the state legislature approved a 2-percent increase to the General Education formula for funding schools.

Should all the expenditures and revenues play out as expected, Nelis said, the district would end the new school year with a fund balance of $8.7 million.

But that’s unlikely, she said.

In an interview with the Pine Knot News, Nelis said she wouldn’t be surprised to see the predicted deficit shrink — the same way it did last year and the year before that — because the district’s budget is generally very cautious.

“We are very conservative on number of students, but normally we have more students open-enroll than predicted over the summer and we aim high on expenses to account for any unforeseen costs that might come along,” she said.

The district is currently spending the last of its building construction money (from the 2016 referendum) finishing up the high school auditorium renovations and reroofing Garfield School.

That budget also included estimated increases to teacher salaries. The 2019-2021 Teachers Master Agreement was approved at Monday’s Cloquet school board meeting by a 4-1 vote of the board, with board member Duane Buytaert voting “no” and Hawk Huard absent.

Cary called the negotiations with the teachers union “really productive and reasonable” and said many of the requests had the students’ best interests in mind.

Afterward Buytaert said he didn’t like the changes to seniority in the contract, and explained that the pay scale can reward teachers with little experience because they have master’s degrees. Many young teachers are getting master’s degrees in education so they get a higher pay rate, but that doesn’t help the school district with finding instructors for the college in the schools program, because they don’t have master’s degrees in the program’s subject areas.

“It’s not just our contract I have a beef with, it’s the colleges,” he said. “It’s a great moneymaker for them, but it puts the district in a hard spot. Suddenly we have all these teachers with a master’s in education, but that degree isn’t good enough for the university to allow them to teach college in the schools classes.”

During Monday’s meeting, superintendent Michael Cary said the district is going to explore implementing a fee structure for use of the newly renovated auditorium.

“We put a lot of money into updating it, so we want the ability to recoup some of that so we have money for future fixes,” he said, adding that the district will also have to decide how it is going to handle running lights and audio for such occasions.

The board also voted to deny a request by the German teacher to be paid for her time spent abroad on a trip to Germany, because her airfare and all expenses are already paid out of student fees. The vote was consistent with past practices in the district.

Regarding the closed session held after the June 10 meeting for Cary’s biannual performance review, board chair Ted Lammi said “a constructive exchange of view was achieved,” and thanked Cary.