Eric Kocsis, Greater Johnstown School District business manager from 2016 to 2020
Friday’s testimony in the school funding trial from Eric Kocsis, business manager of the Greater Johnstown School District from 2016 to 2020, illustrated the stresses facing a business manager in an underfunded district.
Kocsis talked about operating in “survival mode” as he described his job managing the finances of a school district on the edge of solvency.
A certified public accountant, he came to his position in Johnstown after 11 years as business manager in another district.
He recalled his challenging first two weeks in his Greater Johnstown position in the fall of 2016. First, he received a financial report that indicated the district was spending down its fund balance – at a time that it was running an operating deficit of around $3.5 million a year – and was in danger of using all its reserves. Days later, he learned that the district’s middle school required millions of dollars in repairs to be made safe for students.
The district soon decided that the deteriorating building would have to be closed – a decision discussed earlier in the trial by Greater Johnstown Superintendent Amy Arcurio.
“Within a month or two, I saw the dire straits the district was in financially,” he said.
To stem the tide of budget deficits, his first budget prepared for the district included eliminating the elementary school’s afterschool program and cutting slots from the district’s Pre-K Counts program, in addition to closing the middle school building, which also involved furloughs of a dozen staff.
The same budget also included a tax increase. “It was rough and painful,” Kocsis said.
Small items as well as big ones were cut. “We stopped the quarterly newsletters going out to the citizens of the district,” he said.
During his tenure, Kocsis said, he recalled being asked at times whether the district could afford to hire more reading and math specialists, more teachers at the high school and middle school, a librarian, or additional music and art teachers. “We did not have the resources available to provide those services, so my recommendation was that we could not afford to bring on the additional staff,” he said.
Kocsis described the budgeting process at Greater Johnstown as “very challenging.” He explained, “Knowing the limited resources that we had and the needs of the kids that we had in the district, there was a lot of hard decisions that had to be made in preparing each year's budget.”
Within the district, Kocsis earned the nickname “the grim reaper,” he said, “because everything was cut” during his tenure.
More revenues were needed, but the district’s 2017 decision to raise local property taxes to address its financial predicament did not generate the hoped-for revenues. Many properties across the district were re-assessed, property values declined, and in subsequent years the district received less property tax revenue than it had before the increase. “The community is in such poverty, there was no way by keep raising taxes we'd get any more resources from the local community,” Kocsis said.
He left the district last year for a position in another district.
“I hope I made a difference,” he said. “A lot of struggles there before I got there and there's still a lot of struggles after I left there – a lot of hard decisions that the board had to make, cutting things that weren't the best for education.”
The week’s final witness was Karen Molchanow, who has been executive director of the State Board of Education since 2012. More to come on her testimony when she completes it on Monday.
The 21-member board acts as the regulatory arm of the Pennsylvania Department of Education, including four legislators: the majority and minority chairs of the House and Senate education committees.
Developing academic standards and assessments to monitor them are among the board’s responsibilities. Molchanow’s testimony delved into board’s work on the establishment of new academic standards and the college and career readiness goals discussed in last week’s testimony by Matthew Stem, the former Pennsylvania Department of Education official.
Questioning of Molchanow by legislative respondents will kick off week 4 of the trial on Monday. Witnesses next week will address issues of early education, with officials from the School District of Lancaster, a petitioner district, also scheduled to testify.