A key part of 205 Superintendent Ralph Grimm’s proposed budget cuts to buck the trend of yearly budget deficits includes an employee pay freeze.This would apply to all employees including Grimm and administrators but would have to be approved by the Galesburg Education Association and other employee unions.
The savings would be about $1.2 million in scheduled salary increases next year.
He doesn’t blame current and past school boards for budgetary woes saying this is a “statewide phenomena”, as 65 percent of districts in the state are expected to deficit spend this year.
Grimm says it doesn’t seem right that a group get a raise every year, in the middle of a crisis, referring to the roughly 3 percent raise the GEA has negotiated into their contract.
This will have to be settled in negotiations between the board and the unions.
“But that means they have to come to the table and talk to us instead of shooting the messenger,” Grimm says. “And we need for that to happen, sooner rather than rather. They can dispute the facts. They can put out whatever information they want but at the end of the day, I’ll stand on the facts I’ve presented to the board.”
This option was floated last year but according to Grimm after preliminary conversations the unions chose not to engage.
The talks took place as 205 prepared for what was labeled a “doomsday scenario”, the event that schools couldn’t stay open the entire year if they ran out of money.
A last minute 12-month spending plan for K-12 education was passed by the General Assembly in late June, which Grimm said took the immediacy of the freeze off the table.
