ASHEBORO — The Randolph County Schools Board of Education was presented with upcoming budget cuts for the 2025-26 school year.
“There’s been a lot of hands in this work the last two months, really,” superintendent Stephen Gainey said. “We’re shooting for $3.3 million in reductions. We’re not there, but we’re pretty close, closer than we might think right now. I think within another week or two, we’ll be clear of there.”
According to Gainey, the district is aiming for $3.3 million in cuts to best position themselves financially. So far, the process has shored up around $3.086 million.
“We’re looking for every dime we can cut,” Gainey said. “We’re gonna be real and we’re going to be transparent.”
Of that total, approximately $835,000 has come from the elimination of vacant positions, with no currently filled positions being cut.
“I want to do as much as we can without causing people to lose positions,” Gainey said. “We have not at this point and I’m very proud of that.”
Board chair Gary Cook said, “If you can find a way to save $3 million without anybody losing their job, that’s pretty strong.”
The district has also saved around $86,000 in miscellaneous personnel items for things such as reductions in local money utilization and changes in position / salaries, but the biggest savings have come from non-personnel items.
RCSS has shored up $2.166 million with things such as the closure of The Virtual Academy at Randolph and the Social Emotional Learning Program on the campus of New Market Elementary School, reductions in supplies, materials, copiers, printers and lawn services, restructuring of custodial contracts and more.
“What people don’t understand is just what a mess we’ve been in this year financially and with some of the cuts that have been forced on us,” Cook said. “These guys have worked really, really hard to find ways to prevent people from losing their jobs. You have school systems right up the road that are $42 million in the hole and somebody is going to have to bail them out. We haven’t had to ask anybody to bail us out. These guys have worked hard to make that happen.”
Gainey said the district pulled more than $900,000 from its fund balance to close out the books for 2024-25, but that the district will be able to pull that money back with these cuts.
The district is still looking for around $220,000 in savings and, according to Gainey, those final cuts may come with some difficult decisions.
“Our children and our staff are at the front of our mind, but I can tell you that this next amount is going to be tough and that’s very frustrating to me,” Gainey said. “We will continue to be creative. We’ve been down this road before.”
One source of revenue that RCSS had relied on for years was the low-wealth supplement funding from the state, which typically totaled around $2.85 million, but with the current state legislature and budget issues, the district is preparing to be without it.
“What we’re not fine with is that we have a moving target right now from Raleigh,” Gainey said, “We have to figure out what it is.”
Cook was critical of the funding process from the state level.
“The low-wealth money that we were used to getting, we were pretty much promised that that would be frozen, but it’s not looking too promising right now, I’m tired of getting screwjobbed by the government. They don’t care,” Cook said.
“The problem I have, and it’s getting worse every year, is that it seems like we want to do the public school system in, because they’re constantly getting hit. It’s just a bad situation. I don’t care where people send their kids, that’s their choice, but someone has to take care of the rest of the kids.”
