  We give a basis for the space V spanned by the lowest degree part
\hat{s}_\lambda of the expansion of the Schur symmetric functions s_\lambda in
terms of power sums, where we define the degree of the power sum p_i to be 1.
In particular, the dimension of the subspace V_n spanned by those
\hat{s}_\lambda for which \lambda is a partition of n is equal to the number of
partitions of n whose parts differ by at least 2. We also show that a symmetric
function closely related to \hat{s}_\lambda has the same coefficients when
expanded in terms of power sums or augmented monomial symmetric functions.
Proofs are based on the theory of minimal border strip decompositions of Young
diagrams.
