The Lafayette Parish School Board proved at a June 26 budget meeting it is willing to soak students and teachers before giving an inch to Superintendent Pat Cooper.
Photos by Robin May
Board president Hunter Beasley, left, opposes the most sensible means of closing the budget gap by tapping into the rainy day fund; fellow board member Kermit Bouillion, background, favors using the fund.
As the rain poured down outside the school system offices on June 26, the Lafayette Parish School Board gathered inside for a packed-house meeting to tackle its budget issues, once again ignoring the one option it has to place an umbrella over vital jobs and programs: a $66 million reserve fund - its so-called "rainy day fund."
The Lafayette Parish School System is faced with a $23.5 million budget deficit, the looming possibility of about 300 school system employees losing their jobs, including more than 100 teachers, and the complete destruction of a Turnaround Plan aimed at closing the achievement gap on what for decades has been a mediocre school district.
Through prudent budgeting and planning, this and previous school boards accumulated a reserve fund to protect the system against the very situation it now faces - a budget deficit that threatens jobs, programs and progress.
For the LPSS, that rainy day is here. It should tap into the fund.
Even board member Kermit Bouillion, a staunch fiscal conservative, agrees. 
"I've been very, very conservative in the way I've voted with our tax dollars," Bouillion said during the June 26 meeting. "But LPSB is living in extraordinary times. In my first time in four years, I'm confident in us borrowing from the rainy day fund."
Despite Bouillion's recommendation, and the three solutions presented that evening by Superintendent Pat Cooper that would save all positions and avoid a 33:1 student/teacher ratio, a majority of board members had other ideas.
They instead spent close to six hours going line by painstaking line through the massive, phone book-size budget, voting individually for each cut, with a nearly identical 6-3 vote for each budget item. The end result: a mere $800,000 in savings.
The plodding meeting seemed to confirm that some members of this board - those who most likely will not be 
members come January - are willing and even eager to burn the school house down on their way out the door.
The board's hypocrisy was even clearer when it came to the legal services budget and its refusal to save more than $100,000 by eliminating funding for the Hammonds & Sills law firm, which was selected earlier this year to replace the free legal counsel offered by the district attorney's office.
While they're trying to come off as fiscally responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, this majority contingent of the school board has an ulterior motive: They're dead-set on destroying the school system as part of a vindictive plot to get even with Superintendent Cooper, whom they despise. A number of them won't be around to witness the wreckage.
November elections will likely remove several of the current board members and a couple of others won't even be on the ballot, which means they won't be politically impacted by the votes they are casting today.
These lame duck board members won't go quietly and are overstepping their authority in the process. It's the superintendent's responsibility to draft the school system's budget. The board's role is to either approve or deny the superintendent's proposal.
In opposing the use of the reserve fund to plug the budget gap, the board argues that such action today will lead to an exhaustion of the $66 million fund, ignoring the fact that in better economic times the fund will be replenished. They also attempt to lay blame for the deficit on Cooper's support of charter schools.
Those are scare tactics.
Cooper has presented several proposals to dip into the account while preserving adequate funding levels, and the impact on the school system's budget from charter schools will only come to about $8.5 million. (It's critical to note that the charters were coming regardless of Cooper's support; BESE approved them as Type 2 charters after the board declined to approve them as Type 1 charters; the result is that Lafayette now has charters, but LPSB has no oversight.)
The board and Cooper's other detractors aren't talking about the real issues that got the system into this financial quandary, including several unfunded state mandates, among which is a $1 million increase in the school system's retirement system contribution, a required $2 million salary increase for full-time employees, a $1.6 million reduction in the state's Minimum Foundation Program allocation due to increased sales tax collections (which the board has refused as an option for balancing the budget), and an increase of a little more than $3 million in health insurance costs.
There is no foreseeable end in sight for this year's budget fight, but there may be a way out of this mess if Cooper sticks to his guns and refuses to let them wreak havoc on their way out.
State law gives the school system some leeway on when a new fiscal year budget must be adopted. Though the 2014-15 fiscal year officially begins July 1, there are two extensions, with the first deadline coming Sept. 15. If the school board and Cooper are unable to come to an agreement on a budget by then, the school system is allowed to revert to last year's budget. State law allows the school system to use up to 50 percent of its previous year's budget before a new budget must be adopted, which would happen some time in December.
So maybe, just maybe, Cooper gives them their destructive budget in December and a new board comes in Jan. 1 and puts the fire out before it starts to spread.
Rain, after all, can't extinguish a fiscal inferno.