Q&A: Clovis schools official discusses budget, PARCC

Editor's note: Clovis Municipal Schools Superintendent Jody Balch discussed several topics as part of a periodic series checking up on issues related to the school district.

Q: A final confirmation vote for Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's education secretary nominee, is expected to take place Monday. If confirmed, how do you believe US education will fare under her guidance?

Balch: I can only speak for public education, but she never attended a public school, her kids never attended public schools, she's never taught in a public school, and she knows a lot about private schools and the voucher system. She's probably good for that group, but I don't know how she could pass judgment or offer any strong insight to public education when you've not experienced public education.

Q: How dire do you believe the state budget situation is going to get for the district, and how much has your budget been cut so far?

Balch: So far, budget was touched $883,000 in the special session, and this week it was touched to $1.1 million more, so right at $2 million out of cash balance. Right now, we can weather the storm, if the storm will quit reoccurring each and every week of each and every month. Cash balance, we had about $10 million. It takes $4.5 million to reach payroll each month. My philosophy is, just in case the state can't pay our people, I just like having a month's salary in emergency funding, which would be $4.5 million.

Another expense that we incur is all of our federal programs, all of our title programs. We fund that initially, waiting months for reimbursement, so we're out of pocket at any given time $3.5 million.

Another reason for having cash balances is for emergencies. If an elementary roof collapses, you're immediately looking at about $1 million. Yes, we have insurance, but you've got to react quickly, and cash is how you react quickly, not waiting for insurance payments.

Q: How has the district worked to improve PARCC scores, and are you optimistic about scores this school year?

Balch: I think we're always optimistic, and of course, this will be the third year that we've taken the PARCC, and probably one of the biggest things is we have a history now. We know the process, we know what to expect. Clovis, and all districts are using Istation - it's a reading and a math software - so there are strong interventions using Istation assessments and the instructional program software that support individual skills in reading and math for our students.

We used what's called Imagine It two years ago, and that was certainly my first year in this position. Imagine It was a good program, but it wasn't tied to the state's data system, so when we would submit reading data, we're not sure that ever really correlated with the state, because everybody else was using DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills).

Then, last year, we went to DIBELS, and we felt pretty good about it - it's a good program - and then they did away with DIBELS. So we go from Imagine It to DIBELS, to get on board with the state's data recording system so that we could compare apples to apples, instead of our Imagine It program.

We're on Istation now, and Istation has great assessments. The software that we purchased certainly supports individual skills in reading and math for our elementary kids.

We have a great instructional team that's new now - at least the leader is. We've always had a good instructional department, but they're doing regular monitoring and support from that group with all of our buildings.

We have a group of principals that are in the PPE program. That's Principals Pursuing Excellence, and typically, those are principals that are going to be involved in that program that have 'D' and 'F' schools. It's an intensive program with the PED, and there's lots of training and lots of on-site visits, and very prescribed intervention methods and targets for those schools.

Q: What are your top three priorities for CMS in 2017?

Balch: The first one would always be what is should be, and it's the success of our students, but for the students to succeed, we really have to figure out a way to fully staff all of our buildings with qualified teachers. They are not available; that's the problem. Research, everything, states that the success of the student depends on the quality of the teacher in the classroom, and I firmly believe that's true. We've got awfully good subs, because typically they're retired teachers, but our number one priority would be to fully staff our buildings with full-time, qualified teachers. One of the things that we're doing to try to attract those, which was just approved by the board, is a signing stipend for three years, and giving our brand new teachers some motivation to come to Clovis and to teach for us.

The second one, I would say, is we need to ensure that we get the $20 million bond and the 2 mill levy passed, and of course, that's going to occur or not occur this next week. Everybody's worked very hard on this, and our community has done a wonderful job supporting us in the past, and we just hope they continue to do so.

The third one would be, we'd like to continue to be financially responsible and accountable to our taxpayers, whether it be bond money, whether it be our operational money, and continue to do the things we tell our taxpayers that we're going to do with our money, and be as transparent as possible.

— Compiled by Staff Writer Eamon Scarbrough