Rochester School Superintendent Terry Dade had a couple of things to tell reporters in a news conference Thursday afternoon:
- One, the school district’s deficit is $30 million, not $50 million as feared.
- Two, that’s bad enough that some serious decisions will have to be made in the coming weeks to deal with it.
- Third, Dade isn’t ready to say what plans he may have to close the gap.
Dade says the State Comptroller’s Office staff will be joining his staff to continue their investigations, beginning October 4th. They’ll go over last school year’s budget line-by-line to see where spending went overboard. But for starters, Dade says the district overspent on employee benefits, retirement benefits, contract transportation and charter school tuition. They’ll also go over the current year’s budget to look for potential problems and consider what may have to be done for 2020-2021.
Dade says he first learned of the problem last week, and staff believed up until then that the budget was balanced. Dade’s predecessor, Acting Superintendent Dan Lowengard, says he was also unaware of the coming crisis, although Lowengard says there’s no way the finance department staff of the school district didn’t know something was wrong.
Dade says he’s not prepared yet to talk about what cuts the district may have to make to right-size its finances. He says he’ll work with teachers, unions, staff and parents when the time comes to make them.