The motion passed on a 7-1 vote, with trustee Alex Saitta voting against the measure.
Some other the other trustees supported the budget reluctantly.
Board Chair Jim Shelton said the board has been working on the budget since October, and all had hoped for better results.
“I don’t think there’s a single person up here who is happy,” Shelton said. “I know I’m not. There are no easy answers, no simple solutions. I don’t think anybody walks away happy.”
Trustee Oscar Thorsland said that he was reluctantly supporting the budget, although he does not agree with it entirely.
Thorsland said that the state legislature could have helped local school districts across the state by setting the school year back to 170 days instead of the current 180. Thorsland said that the savings realized with just 10 fewer days would have been enough to avoid the massive layoffs that are included in the budget.
“We would not have had to eliminate jobs,” Thorsland said.
The state general assembly voted to allow local school districts to delay state-mandated STEP pay increases for teachers in order to balance their budgets. Thorsland said that the matter should not have been left to the choice of the local districts.
“Oconee County did not eliminate their STEP increases this year, but we did,” Thorsland said.
Thorsland was concerned with other districts having an unfair advantage in attracting the better teachers due to the STEP issue.
Superintendent Henry Hunt said that the district staff has spent countless hours trying to achieve a balanced budget. Teachers and administrators were asked for input as to ways the district could operate less expensively without cutting jobs. In the end, the district found the elimination of positions necessary.
More than 100 positions were eliminated, including 29.7 teaching positions.
“It is a difficult thing to reduce the budget down, especially when there are faces attached to those reductions,” Hunt said.
Because the state budget is still being debated in Columbia, and other revenue sources are in question, the budget includes a $1.2 million contingency fund to cover any future revenue cuts.
“When you develop a budget you’re really developing targets,” Hunt said. “We’ve done the best job we can with our projections.”
Hunt said that as things stand now, the base student cost funding from the state would be roughly equal to 1996 levels.
Saitta later clarified that the base student cost was actually just one of several sources of revenue for the district.
The district’s total budget of $91 million was roughly equal to the budget from 2005.
“If our total revenue was at 1996 levels, we wouldn’t have the lights on in here tonight,” Saitta said.
Saitta said that while there were many positive aspects to the budget, he felt the district made a mistake by not cutting administrator’s salaries 10 percent across the board in order to save the jobs of 15 teachers.
He also felt that the district did not sufficiently cut non-classroom expenses sufficiently.
Saitta said that the district needs to be restructured in order to continue in these tough economic times.
He predicted that the economic situation in Europe would slow the economic recovery in the United States.
Shelton compared the budget to the children’s game pick-up sticks. “After you drop the sticks on the table, several will roll to one side or the other, and those are easy to pick up,” Shelton said.
“Then you come to the point in which every time you try to pick up one stick, it affects five or six others. That’s where we were with this budget. Everything we thought of cutting affected countless other things.”
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