More than 100 volunteers recently helped the Monroe School District identify $2 million worth of ideas for trimming its strapped budget.

The public is invited next week to help prioritize which of those ideas should be slashed or saved.

Suggestions include adding $2,000 by raising a fee for a creativity conference and saving $194,000 by eliminating three elementary school teacher positions.

Kindergarten busing, field trips and big-ticket athletics purchases also are among the targets.

School board President Tom MacIntyre said the long list points to the hard decisions ahead.

“It’s not like a bunch of insignificant things. If it were that, it would be easy. That’s part of the reason the community needs to be involved. These are tough choices, and they affect the community,” he said.

Monroe school leaders are looking for $1.7 million to trim from the district’s $52 million budget.

The district spent nearly $1.4 million more than it brought in last year, burning through much of its savings.

Monroe made some cuts during the summer. Yet it’s still looking at a gap between expenses and revenue and could end the 2006-07 school fiscal year with as little as $100 per student in reserves, according to its budget.

Superintendent Ken Hoover decided to involve the community in finding solutions. He joined the district in July.

The 100 volunteers, half of them school staff, earlier met in 12 “budget work groups.” Each was given a hunk of the budget to review and a dollar amount of cuts to identify.

Hoover said listening to the community gives school leaders a direction to head in.

“It gives us permission to look at things with fresh eyes,” he said.

On Dec. 6, a new batch of people will be divided into groups, and they’ll assign point values to each recommendation, determining what they think should be cut first, second or not at all.

“We’ll be anxious to see how it sorts out,” Hoover said.

School leaders stress that just because something is on the list of recommendations doesn’t mean it will be cut.

Some of the ideas may not be feasible because of state laws or labor contracts.

Others might have unintended consequences. Doubling summer school fees to $250, for example, could cause fewer students to participate. Cutting the number of elementary school teachers could lead to larger class sizes.

The school board ultimately will approve a budget for the 2007-08 school year. Final decisions won’t be made until spring.

Before then, there will be more meetings to hear public comments.

Nancy Truitt Pierce, a local businesswoman, took part in the budget work group process, examining what the superintendent’s office, the school board and other administrators spend.

The group started by marking the school board’s $5,000 travel budget for cuts.

“We felt like it was real important … for it to start at the top,” Truitt Pierce said. “We tried to step back and think about that. If I were running this organization, what makes sense?”

It was an eye-opening experience, she said.

“You couldn’t get to any recommendation without it impacting some people’s jobs. And that’s hard.”