The Grand County Board of Education announced last week that the school district will not have to implement a 4 percent pay cut for all district staff for the 2009–2010 school year. The pay cut was among four budget cuts intended to pay off a $1.2 million deficit for the current school year.

The deficit was discovered at the end of September by Richard Clark, a retired business administrator from the Murray County School District who has been assisting the GCSD with financial matters this past summer. Clark and school district officials have said the deficit is the result of monies being misallocated over the past few years from restricted fund accounts to the district’s operating fund. Those accounting errors, officials said, led the Grand County Board of Education to believe the district had a positive fund balance in the operating account, a belief they used to plan the budgets for the 2008–2009 school year and, using the same figures, the current school year.

Originally, the 4 percent pay cut was slated to begin with the November payroll, and was designed to save the district $262,408, if the funds could not be raised in other areas. School board member Jim Webster said the board had been “working hard” to try to find another avenue that didn’t require such a large cut in staff salaries.

“We postponed the cut until November to try to find other sources to fulfill that amount,” Webster said. “The whole time Richard [Clark] kept crunching numbers, and we were constantly getting new budget information. As we were drilling down on the cuts, we kept working with Richard to pare down that 4 percent.”

The first break the board received was obtaining financially distressed district status from the Utah State Board of Education. That status gave the district permission to move restricted funds into the operating account to help cover some of the deficit repayment. Webster said that after looking at the amount they could move, the board started to understand the big picture more clearly and became more and more comfortable decreasing the pay cut from 4 percent to 2 percent and, eventually, avoiding the cut altogether.

“We started feeling more confident that we could fiscally avoid the pay cut,” Webster said. “We believe that we can survive the school year by using the restricted funds, and feel that we should while we have the ability to do it.”

The second break that has helped close the gap on the deficit was the implementation of insurance premium co-pay for all GCSD staff. As part of the budget cuts, the staff members were now required to pay a percentage of their health insurance premiums, an action that was put into effect immediately after the board received the new budget figures. After the numbers from those payments started to come to light, the board realized there were more cost savings to the district than previously planned, Webster said.

Those savings, coupled with the reallocation of restricted funds, resulted in the removal of the salary cut from the reworked budget.

“We never wanted to have to make the cut, and this sends a positive message to the teachers and staff about how important we feel they are,” Webster said.