Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE-THE COLLEGE AND THE DEVELOPING, MODERN EDUCATION SYSTEM - The modernization of financial management
supplied by the Economic Board. The church district was able to supply until 1895 the shortfall appearing on the Institution’s balance sheet as it made its pension payments. At this point, after lengthy discussion, it was decided that the Institution would meld into the state pension fund. The teachers viewed this turn of events as highly unfair, but there was nothing to be done. One of the difficulties was that the state pension fund would not subscribe nor did it provide coverage for teachers of theology working in denominational institutions. So it was the church district which supplied these teachers with such coverage. The College Pension Fund had close to seventy-five thousand forints in capital of which a little more than twenty thousand was paid as severance pay to members who had paid into the original Institution’s fund. After this, the College Pension Fund had only minor obligations to meet and, with more than fifty thousand forints as base capital, increasingly more funds became available and could be used to meet other urgent payment obligations. Despite the regular donations of benefactors, despite the sums from church collections, despite several changes of economic models and despite their flexibility to adapt to external conditions, the overall financial management of the College remained on an unsustainable path. The causes were not internal, but external. In the meantime, the educational environment, the education “market” changed considerably. The expansion of public education combined with the state’s rapid and progressively increased involvement made it impossible for the College to maintain operations through self-sufficiency. The government had, from year to year, devoted an ever-increasing amount of money towards education, which meant that, at the beginning of the 1890s, the state spent more than twice as much on every student in a state institution than on a student in an average denominational school. This difference could certainly not be applied to teachers’ salaries or it would have resulted in countless unfilled teaching positions in the denominational or church schools. As a last resort, the school was forced to decrease its operating costs, devote itself to more extensive farming and, when all the limits were reached, sink into debt. The College in Patak was thus forced to borrow money in 1877 in order to continue its newly-started construction projects. A loan of fifty thousand forints with an interest rate of seven percent helped to quickly finish the work but it also marked the beginning of something new. The notion of applying for government aid was already raised by the leadership but, in view of the potential negative repercussions on the College’s autonomy, it was rejected. In the following decades, additional marked disadvantages surfaced and greatly hindered the College’s competitiveness with similar public institutions. For instance, it was with very great difficulty that money could be made available to meet the intermittent raises in teachers’ salaries. This situation was aggravated by the launching of parallel classes at the secondary school level, something which imposed a significant additional burden on the institution at the very end of the century. The leadership of the church district voted against the notion of applying for state funds both at the turn of the century and in 1904. It decided, instead, to squeeze the needed 600-800 forints for teachers’ salaries out of its own budget. An obvious division of camps can be seen between those who were affected. The teachers, especially those who taught in the secondary school, were in 139 Lajos Pósa (1850-1914) was a poet and author of children's literature. He studied in Sárospatak
