Putnam County Schools may lose as much as $500,000 in funding cuts, school board officials say.
As part of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin's plan to cut funding for most state agencies by 4 percent, that plan also includes a 1 percent cut in state aid to public schools, Putnam County Superintendent Chuck Hatfield said at Tuesday's school board meeting.
According to school board treasurer Chris Campbell, that equates to about $550,000 in cuts from Putnam County schools. Tomblin made the announcement earlier this month in a press release, which noted that West Virginia's public schools have not been subject to budget cuts in recent years.
"We've been hearing for a couple (of) years that this was coming," Hatfield said. "We're financially stable enough to absorb that; it's not gonna put us in a deficit or anything, but it's still going to take away things that we would have done [and] programs we may have offered."
It's still too early to determine the specifics of the funding cuts, such as if they would go into effect immediately or in the next fiscal year, Hatfield said. The school board would ultimately decide where to make those cuts, but there's been no discussion about where they would be made.
Also unknown is if cuts would affect the school district's restricted funding - that is, state and federal money that must be used for certain purposes - or its discretionary funding.
"Probably between 85 and 90 percent of our budget is in personnel, so there's not a whole lot of discretionary money to begin with," Hatfield said.
Other school board members speculated as to what caused the statewide cuts in the first place.
"The state government is too big to start with," School Board President William Legg said. "You've lost all the coal mines, you've lost all the chemical plants, and those were the two main incomes in the state of West Virginia."
Reach Elaina Sauber at elaina.sauber@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-3051 or follow @ElainaSauber on Twitter.