Outside, wind and snow blew, and the temperature remained around zero. Inside, the numbers seemed chilling, too, as two dozen school officials studied projections for revenue and enrollment.

Eventually, the figures could force the Lawrence Board of Education members into some hard decisions — dropping some teachers’ contracts, for example, or allowing student-teacher ratios in elementary schools to grow.

Budget work has begun in similar meeting rooms in buildings across Kansas, with superintendents, staff and school boards making financial decisions for the next academic year.

As always, the great variable in their calculations is the amount of state aid the Legislature will provide for elementary and secondary education. Districts must make key decisions — such as whether to renew teachers’ contracts — by May 1, but lawmakers typically don’t act on budget matters until later that month.

In Lawrence as throughout the state, budgeting can be a grim process, grimmer still when districts’ costs continue to rise but no increase in state aid is in sight.

“Maybe all the districts should cut athletics to get attention,” mused Lawrence school board member Rich Minder.

Murkier than usual

The state aid picture this year is even murkier than usual because of the unsettled status of a lawsuit — brought in 1999 by the Dodge City and Salina districts — challenging Kansas’ school-finance system.

Shawnee County District Judge Terry Bullock ruled in early December that the system was unconstitutional. Bullock said the state distributed aid unfairly and spent too little on schools to provide all children an adequate education.

Bullock’s ruling was merely preliminary, however, and he gave legislators and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius until July 1 to fix the problems. That deadline may or may not be met.

State aid to districts currently stands around $2.6 billion a year, which Bullock found to be about $1 billion below the level needed to provide every child a suitable education. Sebelius has proposed phasing in a $304 million increase over three years.

But officials in Kansas’ 302 school districts cannot wait for legislative action to begin their budget-building.

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Getting attention

The work typically begins quietly. The recent budget session in Lawrence, which preceded a regular school board meeting, was carried on Sunflower Broadband, but no parents spoke.

In many districts, few parents ever attend such meetings or seek budget details.

“I actually believe that most people trust school districts to effectively and efficiently manage district funds,” said Cherokee Supt. Tim Burns.

Of course, parents do become interested when board members finish their budget and it becomes clear which programs will suffer.

Teachers account for 61 cents of every dollar spent by districts, or about $2.28 billion in the current school year, according to the state Department of Education.

The other costs of education — buildings, support staff, textbooks, specialized programs — consume the rest of a district’s budget and have been most vulnerable to cuts in recent years, state officials say.

That has been true in Lawrence, which is among the two-thirds of Kansas districts where enrollment has been declining. Since state aid is tied to enrollment, a loss of students means a loss of dollars.

‘In a hole’

Partly because of a 300-pupil decline — to 9,600 students — over the past three years, Lawrence has closed and consolidated some schools, eliminated curriculum coordinators and all-day kindergarten, and reduced programs, activities, support services and teaching staff.

So estimating next year’s enrollment is crucial in the budget process. If the Lawrence district’s costs remain constant and general state aid remains unchanged at $3,863 per pupil, the district may have to cut its budget from about $60 million this year to about $58 million for the next school year.

“We’re starting kind of in a hole,” Kathy Johnson, director of finance for Lawrence schools, told the budget committee.

Sebelius’ proposal — if it passes — would still force a cut of about $961,000 for Lawrence. And that reduction would have to be made even as the district seeks to comply with federal government’s new No Child Left Behind law, which requires districts to demonstrate constant improvements in student achievement.

Increasing costs

Dale Dennis, deputy commissioner of education, said the pressure on district budgets was perhaps the greatest he had seen in 35 years in Kansas. Despite past cuts, districts struggle to keep pace with increases in insurance, utilities and motor fuels, he said.

For example, fuel has risen an average of 20 cents per gallon since August. Conservation can save some expense, Dennis said, but the same buses run the same routes day after day. In December, Lawrence school buses burned an average of 674 gallons of fuel a day.

Meanwhile, superintendents struggle to explain such issues to legislators — and to the parents in their districts.

“People ask me to give them the ‘layman’s version.’ This is the layman’s version,” said Lawrence Supt. Randy Weseman.

To help inform the public, superintendents in every district prepare a “budget at a glance” summarizing expenditures by function, revenue sources, enrollments and tax levies. Wichita officials even have a 14-minute video to explain budgeting.

Yet the task of drafting a budget or trying to understand it can remain daunting. Waubaunsee East’s Chuck Schmidt has been a superintendent for three years and acknowledged, “I still don’t fully understand it.”

‘A whole new territory’

“It’s very difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t work with it daily,” he added.

Meanwhile, in Lawrence, as elsewhere, education officials begin with guesses about their district’s near future. For some superintendents, figuring out how much money they might have is harder than deciding where that money could be used.

“How we spend the money and how we determine what to spend it on is the easy part,” said Cheney Supt. Brad Neuenswander.

Until the revenues sort themselves out, programs that the Lawrence district’s residents take for granted — school nurses, athletics, background checks on personnel or music — face uncertainty.

“We’re just not in a position to hold bake sales,” Weseman said. “We’re in a whole new territory.”