WAUWATOSA, Wis. — The Wauwatosa School District’s chief financial officer, Scot Ecker, told the school board Thursday, Aug. 22, that his predecessor made a $4.2 million “error in budgeting.”
Ecker was recently hired in July. He said he has already started cutting the budget.
“We have implemented about $2 million in budget cuts — things like not replacing some hard-to-fill positions that probably would not have been filled anyway. We are going to minimize the time teachers will be out of the classroom for professional development, thus less need for subs,” Ecker said.
He said district employees will also now have to pay a portion of their health insurance premiums. He said before, their premiums were 100% covered.
Ecker said there are two school referendums on the November ballot that would support school operations and building maintenance.
“Our budget will be balanced one way or the other. If a referendum were to pass, that’s one piece of balancing the budget. If it were to fail, we would have to go down another path and that would lead to significant reductions to balance the budget,” Ecker explained.
While Ecker said he’s not responsible for the errors, he has an idea of how they occurred.
“I think the budget was built with poor estimates, so some revenues were over-budgeted that were too high. We won’t get that much money. And some were under-budgeted, and those things combined created this budget gap,” Ecker said.
Katharine Hudson is a Wauwatosa resident who has three children enrolled in Wauwatosa public schools. She said she was shocked when she heard about the budget issues, but believes in Ecker.
“I have a lot of confidence in our new CFO; he comes to us with a lot of experience, and he clearly has a plan that he is putting into place and I’m hopeful that can help to rebuild trust with our community members,” Hudson said.
Hudson said she’s hopeful Wauwatosa residents can keep growing and healing.
“I think that it’s easy for community members to feel a lot of anger and to want to lash out, but, at the end of the day, I think we all really care about our kids and our community,” Hudson said.