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Our Lewisville ISD Board Member, Dr Buddy Bonner, explains the reasoning behind why they are...

Our Lewisville ISD Board Member, Dr Buddy Bonner, explains the reasoning behind why they are shutting down 5 Elementary School buildings. I feel that this was a good speech, but it was a shame that he only got around to saying this at the near-end of the Board Meeting, at which point, most of the audience left the room. (Almost everyone stormed out of the room, some yelling, after the Board Voted).

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Still with us either online or in the audience. In two hours and thirty minutes, we are looking at the two things that are driving this district into the gutter right now. We're looking at dropped enrollment and we're looking at no money. Zero. We uh plan to give a raise to our teachers

this year after the audit came in, once we had a a better grasp on where our finances would land. And what that resulted in this year was a thousand dollar one time incremental stipend basically. It's not contractual, won't carry forward to next year. And my colleagues have just pointed out that it's one time money. It's land sales, it's uh SHARS, which is uh

Medicare, Medicaid from the federal government. Um it's it's those sorts of things that there is no confidence that there will be any compensation or revenue to the district next year. And so that's the quandary we're in. I will tell you that in the past this district did not budget uh as tightly. It did not have as tight a budget parameters, and

there was more wiggle room. The reason for that was it was a fast growth district, and we worked on a one-year lag. That's those days are over. Those days are over. The district budgets extremely tightly now because of the things we're talking about tonight, enrollment and the state funding model. Oh, I do want to make I do want to

make one thing clear that Dr. Barker raised. The uh as previously noted, 84% of the district expenses are revenue. You are not going to cut your budget without addressing personnel. Um almost 200 personnel were reduced year to year, 23 to 24.

That does not show up in our our uh TAPR reporting, which is a reporting that the state does because it runs on a one-year lag as well. And so I want to make that known. That's about 60 positions that were at Central Office and about 140 that were at campus. And you and you may think, oh my gosh, how did we do that?

We did that through attrition We did not, we've never done a RIF, we've never done a reduction in force, we've never done a layoff. We do it through attrition. Um I had something else that I wanted to say. Oh, I want to address one more thing with you, and it's the uh administrative cost. We heard tonight uh a quick and simple answer would

be to close this building. Um yeah, that gets you $10 million. It gets you about 2% of the uh overall budget as our uh accountant has illustrated to our auditors have illustrated to you. Um there is probably room to cut more in this building, uh, just like there is more room to cut out on campuses, and that's the direction this district is

absolutely headed without additional revenue consideration by the state of Texas. Thank you.