Chanz Keeney, 38, is probably most concerned about the District 55 budget and finding ways to keep cuts from affecting students.
Keeney is the incumbent for position one, Holley. He is challenged by Brandell Braatz.
“I have two kids that are in our school system,” he said. “This is an excellent way to make sure they get the best education they can.”
He wants to help ensure a good education for his children and the children of the Sweet Home community, he said. “I want to be here to make those hard decisions.”
Some 85 percent of the budget is employees, Keeney said. About 15 percent is in textbooks, maintenance, sports and other expenses.
“That’s normally the first thing that gets cut because we don’t want to cut people,” he said. “I don’t want to see that 15 percent smaller than it already is. That 85 percent we spend on wages, we have no control over because the employees are unionized.”
That makes cutting the budget difficult, he said, especially in situations like this year when the board ratified a new contract with raises before the district found out how bad state revenues were going to be.
On top of that, the district has had continually declining enrollment, he said.
It has an overabundance of personnel, he said.
“We need to fit the correct number of personnel with the correct number of students.”
Overall, the raises will cost an additional $440,000 over the next two years, Keeney said. If it didn’t cost that much, the district could afford to keep more teachers on, but the district cut approximately nine teaching positions.
“I will only cut so much out of the budget that directly affects our kids,” he said. The students need books and resources other than wages.
Now a solution may be to cut days from the school calendar, saving approximately $60,000 €“ about the cost of a teacher; but those are covered under the teachers’ contract too, he said. The union has taken a wait-and-see approach.
“You’d think everybody would just work together on how best to educate our kids,” Keeney said. “It is a public school.”
Many people in private industry have lost jobs or taken pay cuts in this economy, he said. After negotiating for a year, the board voted in raises.
This was two weeks before the governor’s projections were released, Keeney said, and they were worse than expected.
Keeney was the only board member to vote no on the teachers’ contract in March. At the meeting, he explained that with the economy falling, it wasn’t a good time to be giving raises.
Now the union won’t give anything back, Keeney said. By contrast, the classified union has discussed the issue with the board and is willing to work with the board.
Cutting some days is a way to cut without slashing everything else, he said. “Pay freezes would help us out greatly with savings.”
“It’s frustrating being on the board level trying to give the kids of Sweet Home the best education we can, but in times of need we can’t do the things we need to do,” he said. “I’d like to see us pretty conservative with our budget, get that ending reserve back up where it needs to be.”
During budget crunches, Keeney thinks sports should be protected, he said. It’s not a big source for budget cutting, and it has taken its share of cuts already, with an extra bus on sports trips eliminated, along with a couple of coaching positions.
“That directly ties to children,” he said.
Outside of the budget, Keeney would like to see more discipline at Sweet Home schools, he said. “The teachers need to be allowed to teach, eliminating disruptions.”
To that end, he would like to see more parental involvement, stricter discipline and out-of-the-box ways to get students to realize they’re at school to get an education.
He also wants to see math and reading scores continue to rise, he said.
“I would like to think people would vote for me because I’m not afraid to stand up and tell the inside story about how the School Board is run,” he said, adding that he is a fiscal conservative.
“We do have enough money to educate our kids in a public school setting,” Keeney said. “I definitely don’t believe in needing any extra levies or bond measures.”
There’s not talk of that yet, he said, but it’s something that could come up after the legislature passed a law in its last session allowing local districts to charge a tax on construction.
He has strong conservative values, he said. From a budgeting perspective that means making the best of what the district has.
“I really strongly believe in public schools,” he said. “I believe in the system we have. We’re going through budget cuts now, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
When Sweet Home comes out of that tunnel, he wants the district to be in good shape without having cut things like the swimming pool, shops and other programs that directly affect children, he said.
Keeney was elected two years ago in a special election following the resignation of Don Hopkins. He is a feller-buncher operator for Wolfco. He is married to Christy. They have two children, Blake, 8, and Kayleen, 11.