Fayette County schools are

in stable enough financial footing right now that even with expected cuts

in funding from the Georgia Legislature, minimum state requirements on

classroom size can still be met.

But in Fayette County, just

meeting state standards has never been good enough, Superintendent John

DeCotis told board members Monday. And that means tough choices ahead

as the school system fine-tunes its budget for the coming year.

"We have always been ahead

of all the requirements the state passes down because our standards are

just higher," DeCotis said. "How our budget turns out is going

to depend on how far we want to stay ahead."

System comptroller Jim Stephens

told the board at the regular monthly meeting that red-pen work at the

local level is being delayed while the legislature finalizes the full

state budget. Lawmakers are in recess until Monday as hearings on the

budget continue.

But rumors are trickling down,

Stephens said, like a proposal to eliminate the funding of school nurses,

which means $400,000 to Fayette County.

What's not a rumor is the severity

of the state's budget crisis, offered up by Gov. Sonny Perdue in his version

of the budget in January. With severe declines in state revenue, many

of the state's 188 school systems are scrambling to find local funds to

meet even the minimum requirements for student-teacher ratios and the

like.

Georgia funds its schools through

a formula based on "Full Time Equivalents" basically, the total

number of full-time, resident students enrolled in each system on a particular

day of the year. That enrollment is divided by what the state determines

is the ideal ratio of students to teacher, and then funds the resulting

number of teaching spots per school district.

So any expenses beyond the

state's predetermined "minimum" must be done at home.

In that respect, Fayette County

is better off than many of its neighbors, said board member Greg Powers,

who recently attended a gathering of the Georgia School Boards Association

to discuss the legislative budget situation.

"I wasn't there to sing

the blues," Powers said. "Most systems are taxed out, and I

was there to tell them that Fayette County is as tax-rich as it ever was."

But that's no reason to relax,

because Fayette still stands to take in millions less from the state next

year which must be made up somewhere or cut altogether.

To put it in perspective, DeCotis

pointed out that 266 classroom teacher positions in Fayette County are

funded entirely on the local level. If that money has to be used to make

up state shortfalls, he asked, how can the board continue to pay those

salaries?

"In the overall numbers

of students in classrooms at each grade level, yes we can maintain state

standards with our current revenue," he said. "But part of our

advantage in teaching our students has always been that when the state

lowers the minimum requirements, we lower our requirements."

But the salary equation extends

beyond the classroom. Stephens said that nearly half of all paid positions

in county elementary schools are non-teacher positions like support personnel,

food service workers, library aides and not state funded.

"Our support personnel

have never been properly funded to start with," Stephens said. "Things

like building upkeep, computer upgrades those are all needs the state

doesn't address. We're going to have to make some hard choices."

Stephens said his department

is still going over proposed budgets submitted by principals at each school,

and once he knows how much to expect on the state level, the tough work

of slashing here and there can begin.

Powers asked if the board could

rely on overall growth in the county's tax digest, but Stephens said the

tax commissioner's office is typically very conservative in their estimates

of anticipated revenue.

"We will try to zero in

on that as close as we can in May or June," he said.

DeCotis said he hopes to begin

holding budget workshops with the board in early April, with formal presentation

of a much­tightened spending plan in May.

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