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Mohip's team finds $125K in annual savings for Youngstown schools
YOUNGSTOWN
Youngstown City Schools’ chief financial officer is pushing the district toward more efficient spending.
“What I do is all about digging into the dollars and the nitty-gritty,” said CFO Greg Slemons. “The devil is in the details.”
In the details is where more than $100,000 in savings was found since his Feb. 13 start date.
John LaPlante, district chief information officer, found a duplicated service costing the district $125,000 annually.
“We were bringing different eyes in and looking at contracts when he found that we moved – a number of years ago – to voice-over internet,” Slemons said. “We found that we’ve been paying AT&T [the duplicated service] still for years. ... Nobody’s eyes were on it.”
LaPlante isn’t the only one to help the district save. With Mohip’s neighborhood schools plan, district transportation supervisor Colleen Murphy-Penk estimates transportation costs will go down.
The neighborhood schools plan will place students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade into one of nine school buildings closest to their homes, cutting travel time.
The salaries of Mohip’s newly hired senior leadership team are often a hot-button issue.
Some of the hires are: Slemons as chief financial officer on a 12-month contract at an annual salary of $133,000; LaPlante as chief information officer on a 12-month contract at an annual salary of $123,000; and Pat Lowry as director of strategic initiatives on a 12-month contract with an annual salary of $75,000.
Slemons, however, said spending is right where it usually is.
“Our projected spending for salaries this year is right around $42 million and $43 million,” he said. “Just shy of that last year, we spent $41 million.”
Retirement is the reason he provided. And retirement is one of the areas where Slemons hopes to find some additional savings.
“Through the reconfiguration of the schools, I’m hoping to be more efficient in retirements so that we may not have to replace these individuals per attrition,” he said. “We are certainly blazing trails.”
Another area he’s utilizing is in insurance costs.
Recently, Slemons said he hired an outside consultant for $10,000 to guarantee the school district has or will have the best coverage and best premium for property and casualty insurance – or the school gets its money back.
“If they don’t save us, they don’t charge us,” he said.
As far as operational spending within each school, Slemons’ plan is to provide principals with their “pot of money” at the beginning of the year and allow them to make responsible fiscal decisions with it.
“I want them to be the players and be responsible for the money for their buildings,” he said. “They know the operation better than I do.”
Decisions are still ultimately up to Slemons.
Another responsibility Slemons took on is to redevelop the five-year forecast.
Currently the general fund is about $120 million.
Rather than getting into the details of the current five-year forecast, Slemons invested in a third party – Public Finance Resources – to make the most efficient and accurate forecast for the upcoming school year.
“I needed to come in fresh with some type of unbiased calculation where they think the schools are and project based on the state budget,” he said.
The forecast will predict at the end of five years that the district will not be in deficit spending and will remain in the black, Slemons said.
“We are going to do what we need to do expenditureswise to keep the district operating in the black without having to reach out to voters for additional revenue,” he said.
The board of education will have “very little” to do with the process, he added.
Mohip will approve the new forecast in May.
House Bill 70 enables Mohip to lead the schools with state-appointed academic distress commission oversight.
Slemons wants to put the forecast online once it is approved and submitted to the Ohio Department of Education.
“My philosophy is and has always been being very transparent with our finances,” he said.