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When the Kenai Peninsula borough School District voted unanimously Monday night to approve the resignation of Melody Douglas, the chief financial officer, they simultaneously reorganized the district's administration.

Douglas, who's worked in the district since 1978, resigns from her current post effective Dec. 1.

District administrators have chosen not to replace her position, but instead redistribute her responsibilities within the administration.

"This is a transition we've been working on for a while to consolidate senior management to three positions," said Steve Atwater, district superintendent.

Currently, senior management consists of a CFO and two assistant superintendents working under a superintendent.

Atwater said the district plans to transfer Douglas' responsibilities to Dave Jones, assistant superintendent; and Laurie Olson, the current chief accountant; who is being moved to the position of finance director.

"We've got lots of good experience and this is a chance to reorganize," Atwater said.

Board members only begrudgingly approved of Douglas' resignation, and all spoke highly of her work for the district.

"This is a very momentous decision," said Sunni Hilts, who represents the south peninsula. "The fact is she's one of a kind and known nationally for being one of a kind."

Class size

The district went over projection on the number of students enrolled for the 2009-10 school year.

Administrators initially projected enrollment to be 9,047, but counts conducted in October revealed the district had an additional 35 students.

Jones said that in most cases this would be a good thing. Enrollment counts are factored into the state's foundation formula to determine how much revenue the district gets from the Department of Education.

In this case however, the district also went over projection on the number of students it would have enrolled in the Connections Home-School Program by 127.

The home-school students are factored into the foundation formula differently then students in classrooms and only count as .8 of student.

"In effect we have more kids, but we're going to end up in the foundation formula getting less because of where they're at," Jones said.

Cooper Landing lacks students

Cooper Landing Elementary is also suffering from funding issues, but in this case, due to a lack of students.

The administration said on Monday that with only six students enrolled in the K-8 school, there aren't enough students to meet the state's requirement that a building have at least 10 students to receive funding.

Jones estimates the funding shortfall will cost the district between $250,000 and $260,000, but administrators don't plan to close the building.

"The children shouldn't have to suffer because we're down this year when they planned to be there for the full year," he said.

Jones said the district plans to dip into its fund balance to cover the lost revenue.

"That's a prime example right there of why we need fund balance because that's $250,000 that we're not going to have that we had projected that we were going to have," he said.

Jones said a meeting is planned in Cooper Landing in December to address the issue and work on solutions for next year.

"One of the good things about Cooper Landing is when you look at the non-school aged children, there's a lot of them," Jones said. "For the years coming up it looks like if we can get back to 10 they probably have the ability to support that."

This isn't the first time the district has struggled to find enough students to fill a community's school.

Two years ago Jones said the school in Hope was in a similar predicament.

The district found that there were enough students in the town to keep the school open, but some were enrolled in home-school programs.

Enrollment there is now at 16 students, he reported.

"The big thing for people in Cooper Landing to understand is, we're not coming to shut their school down," he said.

Dante Petri can be reached at dante.petri@peninsulaclarion.com