A L’Anse Creuse school board member said he “doesn’t trust” high-level school officials because they withheld news from trustees over a pending multi-million dollar budget deficit for several months.

Trustee Shane Sellers made his comments during Monday’s L’Anse Creuse Board of Education meeting as board members were discussing the budget shortfall and its impact on potential employee layoffs later this year.

“I have a lack of trust with what took place with the budget, specifically, I have a lack of trust because it took so long for our superintendent and assistant superintendent to deliver that news” of a budget shortfall, Sellers told the Macomb Daily,

Neither Superintendent Keith Howell nor Assistant Superintendent Kathy Konon responded to the comment during the meeting.

However, Howell has said in the past he waited for four months to inform the school board because he wanted to bring as much information as possible to the community and didn’t want to sound like an “alarmist.” He now agrees that he should have informed board members earlier about the financial challenges facing the district.

Both administrators are new to L’Anse Creuse Public Schools.

Howell was hired this past summer from Grosse Pointe Public Schools, while Konon formerly worked in Lakeview Public Schools in St. Clair Shores.

School board members and district officials are wrestling with a $144 million annual budget for the 2025-2026 school year, which had faulty budget assumptions.

Konon, the assistant superintendent for business and operations, said at Monday’s board meeting the district is now looking at a $7.6 million shortfall. That’s lower than officials had feared earlier, when they said it could be as high as $9 million.

“It’s difficult, but we do need to address it,” Konon said.

The original budget already had a $3 million deficit that had been approved by the board. But expenses were higher than expected and the district’s revenue was not as much as anticipated,

On the revenue side, L’Anse Creuse’s projections were $884,000 short, while unexpected expenditures came in around $3.7 million. Among the expenses cited were a lack of grant funding that had been counted on; increases in legal costs, sick leave payouts, and staff payouts due to turnovers; additional retirement costs; and others.

School officials are holding budget workshops in an effort to cut costs where possible. Right now, officials plan to use budget surplus — or the so-called rainy day fund — to pay off the red ink. That will leave about $11.3 million in the fund.

But with volatility expected in the financial sector over reductions or eliminations of federal grants and other uncertainties, administrators can’t rule out employee layoffs.

“Here in L’Anse Creuse, some grant dollars went away, but the positions stayed, so we have to get into a space where we are right-sized,” Howell said.

He noted the Grosse Pointe school district in 2023 had a $103 million budget that included the elimination of 15 teaching positions as well as some programs. He believes a number of Michigan school districts will go through a similar exercise either this year or the next. If employees have to be laid off, Sellers said he would prefer the district target administrators and leave teachers as a last resort to cut.

“If we are going to have to do that (layoffs), then it should start in this building,” he said. “If we cut staff, it needs to come from this building first before it comes to buildings that have students in them.”

Board president Adam Lipski vowed to take a tougher approach to approving future budgets.

“This board is going to be very diligent in June when the (amended) budget is approved. It is going to be accurate. This will not happen again,” he said.