The Rhino’s Paul Clark crunches the upcoming GCS budget, which some forecast will be tight:
Close Guilford County Schools observers, including hard-bitten reporters who should have known better, have for four years been telling themselves that, despite the school system’s many fiscal tricks to hide money from the Board of Commissioners and the public, surely next year would be the year in which all the federal stimulus money would run out, the school system’s cash stashes would be empty, and Guilford County Schools would have to make some actual cuts.
Even The Rhino Times, the only news outlet that bothers to crunch the numbers in the school system’s budget every year, predicted last year that the 2011-2012 fiscal year would be the year of reckoning, and that this year, the 2012-2013 fiscal year, the ax would finally fall.
Surely, it seemed, there couldn’t be more money stashed away, or at least Green and the school board would finally accept that, just once, Guilford County Schools would have to take a tiny fraction of the hit the rest of the nation has taken since 2008.
It hasn’t happened yet.
GCS is eeking an increase of $28 million in its total budget and an increase of almost $10 million from county commissioners.
