One Half of One Percent

A few people have asked about the potential loss of $288,000 in “excess costs”. First let me give a quick brief of excess costs. Excess costs is the monies that the district receives from other school districts for money we spend on special education services for their kids. For instance if a special education student is in our schools but lives in Akron, Akron must reimburse us for the money we spend to educate this child, that is above and beyond what we already get from the state for a “typical” child. But of course the state being the state, it must gets its hands on this money first and cause red tape and bureaucracy. So to get our money from Akron we have to report to the state. They collect everyone’s “excess costs” and redistribute them. The above was made possible by your friendly local state representatives. Not only that, districts now had to keep track of each and every kind of student we have. Even though we are not supposed to label kids anymore, there a whole section of reporting that labels every possible handicap, race, creed, sex, one parent, two parent, income, a child could have or not have.

So most districts, typical of government offices had to hire someone to do this new job. The “EMIS” coordinator was born. Because you know job responsibilities can’t shift or become obsolete, they can only grow and refine with your tax money. Once this excess costs business took effect somebody had to it. So some districts had this person do it, some districts had that person do it. Our district had the EMIS coordinator do it.

Everything went smoothly for all districts the first few years. Then this year something changed. It seems a newly imposed deadline was put on this excess costs report. Apparently our EMIS coordinator was unaware of the deadline and we filed late. Of course your first reaction is “How could you not know”? Until you get some facts behind it.

There are 10 districts in Summit County eligible to file for excess costs. Five claim they did not know of the deadline and three of those five filed late, including us. One of the other unaware districts just lucked out and filed on time and the last one filed over the weekend at the witching hour, after hearing of the deadline two days before the deadline. Notification about this new deadline was sketchy at best.

But let’s go back in time a minute. On or about December 4th our Superintendent was notified that our district had missed the deadline. He took immediate action in attempting to recover district monies and disciplined those responsible for the deadline. He also informed the board president Curt Grimes and vice president Therese Dunphy. Apparently they felt no need to inform the rest of the board of the missed deadline or take any disciplinary action regarding the loss of funds. In fact I assumed the entire board found out about the missed deadline the same day I did. January 8th. Silly me. But I guess at the time they didn’t think it was a big deal. Funny how things change. Because now that everyone knows, it has become a big deal.

Except everyone keeps forgetting that an appeal was filed prudently by our superintendent and we may be reimbursed. Only time will tell. In the mean time, I think we should sit tight and hope the state does the right thing. If 50% of Summit County was unaware, I wonder what the state average is this year. If we don’t get reimbursed, it is not the end of the world. While I admit it is a significant amount, it’s not much more than the office renovations. I guess we’ll have to put that on hold. And to put it into perspective, it’s one half of one percent of our budget. It’s a hit but we’ll survive without asking for a levy! And lastly, if the state doesn’t reimburse, we can try to bill the individual school districts ourselves. It will take some time but I think it’s a very real possibility.