What is the cumulative effect of state education funding cuts over the last two years in Catoosa County?
Actually, the state has been cutting our budget for nine years. The last two years, the actual state reductions have been over $10 million, but we received over $4 million in stimulus funds, so the total effect has been well over $6 million for our system. Q: How has the school system responded? A: We have done a number of things. Looking at the economic situation in the state and across the country, we started preparing for the budget cuts by basically trying to protect our reserves. In our system in Georgia, we had the cut midyear, so not knowing what the cuts would be to our system we had to just prepare the best that we could and in doing so what we did was (start building) our reserves. Looking at what’s happened over the last few years, we’ve withheld 15 percent of the school budget in order to prepare for the midyear cuts. We’ve limited field trips, we’ve delayed purchasing buses, we’ve delayed purchasing technology and our class sizes are at the maximum state level. Of course,
