A week before Gov. Matt Bevin presents his two-year budget proposal, Bowling Green Independent School District officials are bracing for the worst.

With declining education funding, Superintendent Gary Fields said there isn’t much more school districts can cut. Like many other school districts across the state, Fields said his district is taking stock.

“We are basically to a point of making some really hard decisions, and it’s going to be about people and programs,” he said Monday at the BGISD board of education meeting at Bowling Green High School. “It’s going to be really tough.”

Board members approved during the meeting a $48.6 million draft budget that will act as a preliminary budget until the district gets a fuller picture of its finances in May. All told, the budget amounts to $48,648,524, with a general fund portion of just more than $41.5 million.

As school district officials await Bevin’s proposal Jan. 16, much uncertainty remains. Jeff Herron, the district’s finance officer, outlined several budget concerns. Among them is the potential for a sharp decline in funding for the Support Education Excellence in Kentucky program, the primary funding formula for Kentucky’s school districts.

“We don’t know what the SEEK budget will be like. We don’t know what the guaranteed base will be,” Herron said. “There has been some talk of all of the state receiving about a 17 percent reduction. The indications are that education will not be spared.”

Herron cast on the 17 percent reduction, but said that even a 5 percent decrease in SEEK funding would result in “almost $830,000” lost.

On top of that, the district expects to pay 46.2 percent more to support the County Employees Retirement System, a system for support staff such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers. That amounts to another half-million dollars annually, Herron said.

Additionally, Herron said salary increases could cost the district $250,000 or more.

Taken together, that’s about $1.6 million the district has to account for “before we turn on the lights,” Fields said.

In terms of per-pupil funding, Herron said the district doesn’t reach into the upper echelons of districts statewide.

“Our district is in the middle of the pack,” Herron said. “We’re in the middle, and we’re not on the upper-end as far as wealthy districts.”

Declining state support for public education has also left local taxpayers picking up the tab, Herron said. The district is “approaching 50 percent” of its funding coming from local tax revenue, he said.

In an interview following the meeting, Fields said the districts’ schools are fortunate to be buoyed by a strong, local economy.

But for other districts, such as those in eastern Kentucky, the road ahead will be much more difficult.

“They are going to have a hard time balancing their budgets,” he said.

In 1990, lawmakers addressed funding inequities among Kentucky’s school districts by passing the Kentucky Education Reform Act. This followed a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling that found the state wasn’t fulfilling its constitutional duty to provide equal educational opportunities for its students.

But now, a recent report from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy has found that funding gains made since the passage of KERA are slipping away, widening the gulf between Kentucky’s richest and poorest school districts.

Going forward, Fields said lawmakers will once again have to take up the issue of ensuring equal education for all of Kentucky’s students.

“They’ve got to figure out a way to get that balanced,” he said.