DAPHNE, Ala. — Polls will open on March 23 for Baldwin County residents to vote on whether to institute a 1-cent sales tax that would help the Baldwin County Board of Education offset its $75 million deficit.

The 1-cent tax — with a life span of three years — would allow the school board to rehire some of the 450 employees it’s been forced to terminate due to budget cuts, according to school officials.

But critics of the measure say they’ve been taxed enough.

School board officials expect the 1-cent sales tax to raise approximately $25 million per year. The school board’s Web site states that all funds raised through the penny tax would stay in Baldwin County. The school board is on record with a resolution stating that its priorities for the penny revenue will be used mainly to keep teachers and local school support employees in schools and to avoid another mass employee layoff. Improvements would include constructing new, or renovating old, school board-owned properties, officials have said.

If the referendum is voted down, the school board said it expects further cuts for academic programs.

“Should Baldwin voters not approve the penny tax, Baldwin schools will slide into a quagmire of debt,” Baldwin County Board of Education communications director Terry Wilhite said. At the end of this fiscal year, $5 million will have accrued; $17 million by 2011; and by 2010, $31 million. “When the economy does improve, if the penny-tax does not pass, the school system will be paying off debt, not pumping dollars into academics. Baldwin stands to lose 400 more teachers and employees should the penny tax not pass — not to mention academic, athletic and fine-arts programs will be devastated.”

At Monday’s City Council work session, Daphne High principal Don Blanchard identified teachers and administrators he said he’d be forced to cut if the tax doesn’t pass. Those employees include: visual-arts teacher Shepard Partridge; biology teacher Stephanie Wainwright; Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps Col. David Landfair; and assistant principals Meredith Horton and Joseph Roh. Due to previous budget cuts, Blanchard already slashed some extracurricular activities as well as overcrowded classrooms. “We don’t have a choir,” he said. “I had to cut chorus. We’ve lost 40 employees. The numbers in our science classes are up this year because I could not hire a new one.”

Daphne Elementary faces a similar situation. “From my understanding, we will cut the art program and the music program if the tax does not pass,” Principal Jan Palmer said. “I have three non-tenured teachers that are subject to be cut along with the assistant principal.” Those staff members include: art teacher Felicia Olds; music teacher Marcia Dowdy; non-tenured teachers  Catherine Scheller, Shaynna Riel and Renee Moorer; and Assistant Principal Pam Jones. “We also have three support staff positions that will be cut,” Palmer said, although she said she has not been given specific termination designations.

“We will lose the funding for part of our assistant principal, two support personnel and two teachers,” W.J. Carroll Intermediate Principal Dana Horst said. “We already have the least number of custodians you can have to maintain a school, the least number of cafeteria personnel to serve our student population, only one special-ed aide to serve all three grades and class sizes already at 31.” Horst said she can’t place names on the units that would be cut because all her teachers are tenured; the school board’s human resources department would determine the school’s terminations. “We lost our innovative and creative technology instruction when our computer teacher was cut,” Horst said. “We could lose art, music and band. We feel like we are at the bare bones already exposing some marrow at this point.”

“We are going to lose personnel and possible programs if the tax does not pass, and it is going to make it tougher to provide the services that we need to provide to our students,” Daphne East Elementary Principal Becky Lundberg said. “If the state Department of Education raises the student-teacher ratio, the cuts may be even more extensive.”

Orange Beach resident Dean Young, however, has started a campaign against the penny tax, including launching a Web site called axetheTaxNow.com. The Web site’s home page includes the words “Taxed Enough Already,” with the first letters of each word colored in red — an oblique reference to the Tea Party, a conservative and libertarian movement that emerged in 2009 with anti-tax protests.

“You don’t fix things like this by penalizing people of Baldwin County and charging them a $75 million tax over three years,” Young said of the school system’s deficit. “That’s mismanagement.”

Instead of the 1-cent tax, Young said the school board should continue making spending cuts. “If everyone else has to cut spending, the school board has to cut spending, too,” he said.

Young said he started his “Axe the Tax” campaign because he believes the school board didn’t heed warnings about the potential for a deficit to incur.

“The school board was warned years ago that they should make cuts and get ready for these lean economic times,” he said. “And they chose not to do that. They didn’t listen to the state superintendent two years ago.”

But Wilhite said that isn’t true.

“Mr. Young is wrong,” Wilhite said. “In the fall of 2008 state officials told school systems, including Baldwin, to expect around 3 percent proration if voters passed the Rainy Day Trust Fund amendment — and a slightly higher amount if it didn’t pass. Voters approved the release of rainy day funds. Yet, in December the governor announced not 3 percent but 12.5 percent proration, which sent shock waves through school systems across Alabama.”

Proration has been declared four times in the last two years.

“With this information noted, maybe Mr. Young needs to ask the state’s accountants did they see the economic tsunami coming,” Wilhite said.

How it came to this

The Baldwin County Board of Education faces its largest deficit in its history, reportedly due to a variety of factors including: a disproportionate equity funding system; increased transportation costs; state mandated raises; and a decrease in state funding and sales and use tax revenues.

At Monday’s city council meeting, Council President August Palumbo cited ill effects of equity funding, a system in which counties contribute mills to a state fund based on its population totals; the funds received to be used for education are based on the total number of students within that county. At that meeting, Baldwin County Board of Education Interim Superintendent JaNay Dawson said 41 counties draw from equity funding while only six counties pay into the system. Dawson said the school system has lost $61 million in state and local funding over the past 24 months due to a dip in state funding and declining local and state revenues.

“Also, what Mr. Young — and others not familiar with how education funding works  — may not know is that local school systems earn teacher units based upon enrollment and when the number of employees the state has indicated have been hired and proration is declared, the state does not send enough dollars to pay, even though they’ve spelled out the number to hire, so the local school system has to pay them out of its local general fund,” Wilhite said. “That’s the reason Baldwin exhausted its $22 million general fund reserve in less than 24 months. Although funding ceases for employees, they can’t be let go mid-school year because they’re under contract,” he said.

Wilhite contended that the state Department of Education does not provide enough funding to supply an adequate number of employees to meet the needs of students. “The fact is that Baldwin still has locally-funded teachers, assistant principals, counselors, nurses and teachers and look around at the dire need,” Wilhite said. “We’re still above what the state supplies and five schools don’t even have a nurse.”