Hamilton Southeastern Schools Superintendent Patrick Mapes has been on the job about four months and in that time has reorganized the central office and taken a hard look at the district’s budget.
Mapes gave a presentation to the HSE Schools Board of Trustees during a June 26 work session. He said when he started at the end of February, budget work remained from the previous year — primarily balancing funds that showed deficits — and that the books should have been closed weeks before he arrived.
“We’ve been moving money around and that’s a dangerous game,” Mapes said. “When you take money out of operations and you put it into education, if you put in more than what you really should, something gives — either a project’s not getting done, equipment’s not being repaired or, in our case, we go out and we get general obligation bonds and we start moving items into the general obligation (and) out of operations. It’s just not fiscally responsible.”
Mapes added that future enrollment is a potential concern. He said enrollment, particularly at the elementary level, has declined for the past few years and funding largely depends on the ADM — average daily membership.
“I know it’s very difficult for young families to find affordable housing in our school district, and that plays into that factor,” he said. “We haven’t had a lot of students enroll yet for kindergarten, so we do urge families that have students who are going to be kindergartners to get them enrolled and that way we can hit the ground running to start the school year.”
Mapes said that, based on enrollment, the district could have cut up to 30 teaching positions in its elementary schools. However, he said, there were unfilled positions for classes that require special licenses, such as special education and English language learners.
“So, we just decided to say, hey, let’s repurpose great teachers into these positions that they’re licensed to teach and that way we can continue to provide services to the students where we’re lacking,” he said, adding that no teachers were involuntarily moved into those new positions.
Part of Mapes’ presentation focused on overall teacher salaries. He said the district gets additional funding from the state each year and a minimum of 62 percent of that funding is supposed to go toward teacher salaries and benefits. He said HSE Schools used more than 100 percent of its additional state funding for teacher salaries in 2023-24, with overall teacher salary costs increasing by about $10 million over the prior year.
He said administrator salary costs remained fairly flat at about $11 million between 2022-23 and 2023-24.
Some of the numbers in Mapes’ presentation were positive. He said the district’s elementary and middle school ILEARN reading and math scores are above average. ILEARN stands for Indiana Learning Evaluation and Assessment Readiness Network.
High school students who took the SAT standardized college admissions test also scored better than the state average, he said, and the district’s graduation rate was about 98 percent.
