North Little Rock School Board members conferred with their financial advisers Thursday on the affordability of employee bonuses plus upgrades to the district technology system that will provide every student with a computing device.
The board is expected to vote on those expenses and possibly some construction repair projects, as well, at its regular monthly meeting Oct. 19.
The possible bonuses for both state-licensed employees and support staff range from $500 each that would cost the district $819,313 to $2,500, which would cost the district more than $4 million.
"Do we have funding for a $2,000 bonus?" School Board member Dorothy Williams asked Scott Beardsley, senior vice president of First Security Beardsley Public Finance and financial adviser to the district.
The $2,000 bonus for the district's 1,450 employees would cost the district nearly $3.3 million, a one-time cost that the district would have to draw from a building savings fund it has accumulated over time. One of the purposes of the fund is to allow the district to offset the loss of $7.6 million in special state desegregation aid.
This is the last year that the district will receive that special state aid as the result of a 2014 settlement agreement with the state in a long-running federal school desegregation lawsuit.
The savings fund totaled $31.8 million at the end of the 2016-17 school year and is projected to be about $30 million at the end of the current school year if there are no withdrawals for bonuses or other expenses. The district is projected to have to begin using the savings fund to meet operating expenses in the 2018-19 school year -- the first year without the desegregation aid.
School Board members also are considering spending about $2.8 million for technology upgrades during this school year.
Those improvements call for a computing device for every student and an increase of 8 gigabytes to a total of 10 gigabytes of bandwidth. They also would include improvements in software and the expansion of technology infrastructure components such as servers, wireless access points, network switches and a firewall.
The 1-to-1 ratio of students to devices would be accomplished by equipping every classroom with one cart of Chromebook laptop computers. That would reduce breakage caused by students carrying devices from class to class or to their homes. Additionally the classroom carts of devices would allow better monitoring by teachers of student use of the Internet, district officials said.
Not all of the technology costs would come from the savings fund. The district could used state funding paid to districts based on their percentages of students eligible for subsidized school meals to pay for the student devices, Deputy Superintendent Beth Shumate told the board.
Superintendent Kelly Rodgers said he will recommend that the district incorporate about $8 million over three years into its annual budgets to accommodate the replacement of one-third of all computers every year, along with related costs.
Metro on 10/06/2017