WL School corporation cuts costs

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - West Lafayette Community Schools is getting rid of a food service vendor and looking for a new employees to take over.

Lack of funds have been effecting schools all over the state, causing corporations to look for ways to save money.

The West Lafayette Community school board decided to cancel food service with outside vendors and bring in its own food service director to help cut costs.

"Our initial analysis is about 60 to 70 thousand," said Rocky Killion.

That's how much money the school corporation plans to save by bringing food services in house. And it's the key reason Superintendent Rocky Killion said the corporation is replacing the outside food vendor.

"They're going to be overseeing all the food service programming of our three schools, serving students lunch and we might even look at a breakfast program," said Killion

The food service change wasn't the only financial topic at Wednesday's meeting. The board also reviewed phase one of its strategic plan.

"The purpose of the strategic plan is to give us a five year plan five year mission, why we're in operation, what is it we're aiming for in the school district," said Killion.

The plan uses a committee of about 35 people who will try to better the corporation with eight strategies. Part of that committee's duty is to ensure the corporation doesn't run into budget crunches like this one in the future.

"Two of the eight strategies have to do with creating short term funding plans and long term funding plans for our school district," said Killion

Also at the meeting, the board discussed implementation of a tax referendum study timeline.

"The data should give us some information on the impact tax referendum would have with regards to the school district," said Killion.

Killion said a team is working on gathering information about whether it would be beneficial to have a referendum question for the community about paying higher taxes to benefit the schools.

"There's been a wide swing of the tax rate so I think that we'll just from that knowledge base I think that gives us a good reason to take a look at if there's any room to do a local tax referendum in the study," said Killion.

The tax referendum study timeline will also figure out how much it would cost to bring a referendum question to West Lafayette.

Killion said the school board hopes to have results of the study by September.