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Johnson: Tuition vouchers hurting district
By HAROLD GWIN
YOUNGSTOWN
The treasurer of the Youngstown city schools said the district is “under attack by a wide variety of predatory factors.”
More than 60 outside educational institutions have taken thousands of city school children out of Youngstown classrooms, William Johnson told residents attending a city school board meeting this week.
Those schools also are taking some $34 million a year out of the city school system because state support follows the students, he said.
The state tuition voucher (EdChoice) system will be a key detractor in the future, and open enrollment and charter schools “are becoming a plague to Youngstown,” he said.
Neighboring school districts, unable to pass tax levies to fund themselves, are growing dependent on open-enrollment dollars to support their schools, pulling children from Youngstown, he said.
But despite those losses and some funding uncertainties, the district is in good financial shape at this time, Johnson said as he unveiled the latest version of the district’s five-year financial forecast.
It shows Youngstown will end fiscal 2010 with a $3.6 million cash balance as of June 30.
The picture will improve over the next couple of years as that year-end balance is projected to reach $7.7 million in June 2011 and $10.1 million in June 2012.
However, it will then begin to decline as a four-year, 9.5-mill emergency tax levy expires, Johnson said.
The year-end balance will drop to $9.1 million in June 2013, $6 million in June 2014 and just $2 million in June 2015, according to the forecast.
Forecasting isn’t an exact science, but it is a tool to help view the financial horizon, Johnson said.
Youngstown has cut some $32 million in spending over the last three years and plans to trim an additional $1.7 million next year, but there are other factors affecting its financial picture.
Johnson said real estate tax collections are falling, with delinquencies owed the district now totaling some $9 million.
There also is concern about the status of state funding as Ohio faces its own budget crisis, he said. Youngstown gets about 80 percent of its budget — some $80 million — from the state, and a 10 percent reduction in state funding would be devastating, he said.