No more teachers, no more books?

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The state of Illinois doesn’t have a budget and legislators aren’t returning to Springfield until Tuesday. But school officials across the state are already bracing for the worst.

“We’ll know in the next couple of weeks what’s going to happen,” said Bureau Valley School Superintendent Terry Gutshall. “Some of the things that could be affected are obviously near and dear to us.”

On Tuesday, Gutshall and other superintendents across the state received a message from State Superintendent Christopher A. Koch.

“The Illinois State Board of Education faces potential cuts to many state funded appropriation line items in the FY10 budget,” Koch wrote. “While we await the approval of an FY 2010 budget, the agency strongly urges that districts make no expenditures in anticipation of state funded grants for FY 2010 which began July 1.”

It’s a little bit too late for that.

“Well, shoot, we’ve already hired all these people back,” Gutshall said. “We have to do that in March, and then they tell us two days ago, don’t use these funds.”

Included in the list of state funded budget line items that could face substantial cuts include such things as preschool and early childhood programs and alternative schools.

Gutshall said programs were created, people were hired, supplies were purchased, and parents made plans to send their children, all based on the state’s promise to pay.

Now, that might not happen.

“We haven’t made any cuts yet, but I imagine at our July board meeting I’ll be sharing with our board these many different potential programs that could be affected if the state does not get a budget in place,” Gutshall said.

Even if a budget is approved, schools might still be in trouble. The so-called “Doomsday budget” that Gov. Pat Quinn vetoed before the end of the session would have created the need for nearly $500 million in cuts from the state’s education budget.

Those cuts will come on top of money the schools didn’t receive this year. Gutshall didn’t have the final numbers, but he said Bureau Valley was about $730,000 short on expected revenues in the areas of transportation, special education and preschool. Preschool payments alone were short about $81,000.

As of now, Gutshall isn’t looking at too many cuts to the programs if the state dollars don’t come in.

“We’ll have to bite the bullet, and if they don’t come up with a budget, we’re just going to have to eat it all, and a lot of schools are not going to be able to handle that,” he said. “We’re going to have some tough decisions to make, not just Bureau Valley, but all the schools across the state of Illinois.”

While the programs themselves might continue to exist, they could look more than a little different.

“Maybe, I’m just saying that some schools will decide on any preschool programs they have, that the parents are going to be responsible for transporting all the kids themselves,” Gutshall said. “Parents who think it’s that important will have to get the kids to the preschool program themselves.”

Gutshall said he realizes it’s not just schools looking at funding cuts.

“I know that the state only has so much money to go around,” he said. “But we also have some very needy programs. Everybody thinks their programs are very needy, but I would think education would rank pretty high up on the list.”

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