Nebraska education department to evaluate open positions after Pillen calls for budget reductions

The Nebraska Department of Education is evaluating open positions and looking at other ways to reduce spending following a memo from Gov. Jim Pillen to state agencies in July.

Pillen released the memo early last month calling on state agencies to reduce budgets by 5%. He also instituted a hiring freeze, requiring agencies to get approval from the State Budget Division before creating or refilling a position.

NDE Commissioner Brian Maher told the State Board of Education at its work session Thursday that the memo started conversations in the department about ways it can cut spending now, like reducing travel and equipment upgrades, while also looking at what the department’s budget should look like in the future.

“I think the thing for me that was signaled by this memo more than anything else was what is our state going to do from a long-term perspective, and the signal of what this next legislative session might look like for all of us,” Maher said.

It’s unclear whether the memo would apply to the education department because NDE is a constitutional agency, not a code agency that has a representative in the governor’s cabinet. Maher is taking the memo as a sign for some long-term changes that need to happen, though.

“This was a memo sent out by the governor,” Maher said. “It's not an executive order, and it's not statute, doesn't have the force of law, but the governor, I think, really is signaling, ‘Hey, we've got some budgetary woes in the state, and we need to begin to address those.’”

Maher said the department is looking at several areas to reduce costs, including travel, equipment purchases and technology investments. The department is also looking at any open positions to see what is necessary to fill.

“I think if we can cut now at a time where maybe we have an opening versus a person that we have to get rid of, maybe we should look at that now,” Maher said. “When I say we're taking a measured approach to the hiring process, that's what I mean.”

Bryce Wilson, NDE finance officer, said the education department receives almost $2.2 billion from the state. However, most of that, about $2.05 billion, is state aid that flows through the department to schools.

“It's not anything that we have control over here,” Wilson said. “It's mostly driven by statute and distributed accordingly.”

The memo does not apply to that money, Wilson said. There’s other funding earmarked for certain programs that also can’t be cut, which leaves about $49 million in the department’s operations budget that comes from the state, with $46.5 million coming from the general fund. A 5% cut to that would amount to a $2.3 million reduction.

“The thing that makes us more difficult is that there's a large chunk of that $46 million that's fixed costs, things like rent, salaries, benefits, [Office of the Chief Information Officer], [Department of Administrative Services] fees, things we have no control over, right?” Wilson said. “But even in the portion that we consider variable costs are things that are earmarked in our budget.”

Those variable costs include $7.1 million that must go for assessment and $5 million for student loan forgiveness. There’s also funds that go to help the department meet maintenance and matching requirements for grants it receives.

“Once we start throwing all those things together, it is not an easy task to come up with a 5% reduction for the department,” Wilson said.

Grant Norgaard, assistant commissioner at NDE, said the department is working hard to follow the governor’s memo.

“We want to be faithful to it, but everything has to be measured against the impact that we have when it comes to our students, our educators, and our schools…” Norgaard said. “It's absolutely critical that what we do and the decisions we make are balanced between those two, and we don't lose sight of what's actually our core mission, what's most important to us, and the work that we do.”

By way of full disclosure, Brian Maher is a commissioner on Nebraska Public Media's governing board, the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications Commission.