NewsLocal NewsIn Your NeighborhoodNampa

Actions

School closures, schedule changes lead to millions in savings in Nampa

Posted

NAMPA, Idaho — At Tuesday's School board meeting, the budget for the upcoming school year was discussed.

  • The switch to trimesters from semesters saves the District 20 full-time employees, approximately $1.5 million.
  • The closure of four schools saves the District $2.5 million.
  • The District and Nampa Police Department signed their contract to provide school resource officers to Nampa schools. For the 2024-25 school year, the police department will be paid $600,000 for officers in buildings. That number jumps to $750,000 for the 2025-26 school year.

(Below is the transcript from the broadcast story)

At Tuesday's School board meeting, the budget for the upcoming school year was discussed. I've been following all the changes coming to Nampa's school throughout the fall and after schedule changes, school closures, and four-day school weeks coming up, many positions have been eliminated.

"We did change the high school schedule from the block, that made a lot of people uneasy, changed it to trimesters. That actually provided us an additional 20 less FTE that we were able to cut," said the District's Finance Director Randy Dewey.

FTE are full-time employees. The money saved from those 20 jobs includes salary, benefits, and retirement. I called the District to find out just how much those 20 jobs will save and they tell me that it is about $75,000 per position for a total of around $1.5 million.

Also affecting jobs this year is the end of federal funds related to the pandemic called ESSER funds. The district was receiving $3.5 million of pandemic relief. With the end of the program, 70 full-time employees were cut.

The district told me that most were administrators and teachers who knew they were being paid from funds and were not always guaranteed a job.

The District and Nampa Police Department signed their contract to provide school resource officers to Nampa schools. For the 2024-25 school year, the police department will be paid $600,000 for officers in buildings. That number jumps to $750,000 for the 2025-26 school year with an additional officer being added to the roster in 2024 and another in 2025 to bring the total number of SROs to thirteen.