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The Michigan City School Corporation is shedding just over 100 jobs to help close a $6 million budget deficit.
According to school officials, seven teaching positions and some administrative positions are
being eliminated.
The vast majority of the lay offs are in areas like classroom assistants, secretarial
positions and maintenance.
Michigan City School Board member Beryle Burgwald said the deficit began accumulating during the several years it took to complete a countywide property tax reassessment starting in 2006.
No tax dollars were coming in during that time period forcing the school corporation to borrow monies to operate then pay back those funds with interest. Without figures based on actual tax dollars coming into the district, budgets for upcoming years had to be calculated based on estimated revenues coming into the school corporation.
Burgwald said the projected monies coming in were overestimated, though, meaning the dollars spent turned out to be greater than the actual dollars coming into the district once the reassessment was completed in 2010
''We're talking about a debt crisis that hit us through basically no fault of our own,'' said Burgwald.
School Board member William Greene also blamed past administrators, saying money was being shuffled from several different line items within the budget to conceal some of the debt incurred from construction of new schools and other projects.
Burgwald said the staff reductions only narrows the deficit by about $1.6 million.
