Brown County Schools’ budget is dropping again to stay in line with reductions made last spring.
But the tax rate is expected to stay rather consistent, with some money being moved to different funds to allow a cash balance to build back up.
The total district budget for 2017, across all funds, was about $32 million.
For 2018, it’s $27,057,764.
The 2018 general fund budget is $14,928,751. Last year it was advertised as $16 million.
“Hopefully we won’t spend that much,” said consultant Bob Harris about the general fund while speaking to the school board Oct. 5. “You never like to get it right up to the limit, but as time goes on, we can still make adjustments and kind of tighten our belts a little bit. We’ll keep it below that amount, I feel confident about that,” he said about the general fund.
The rainy-day, capital projects, transportation and bus-replacement funds are all advertised lower for 2018 as well when compared to 2017.
“(We) advertise lower to kind of match our understanding that we need to be pulling in our budget a little bit more, so kind of a direct reflection of less students, less staff, less translated across those funds. Again, really just trying to get ourselves more aligned with our reality,” Superintendent Laura Hammack said.
She said the budget was built to keep the tax rates consistent while taking into account everything that is on the “taxpayers’ shoulders,” like the referendum.
“(We’re) really trying to make sure there’s not a swing for that taxpayer either way,” she said.
The tax rate for the school right now is 69 cents per $100 of assessed property value, and the tax rate for 2018 will be within a penny of that, Harris said.
“That depends on the assessed values, but Brown County assessed values are typically on the uptick. The higher the AV goes up, the lower the rate goes,” he said.
In 2017, a new 8-cent referendum generated around $980,000 for the school district, with a penny of it going to the Brown County Career Resource Center. The referendum is helping to pay for teacher salaries.
The school board will vote on the budget at its Oct. 19 meeting.
The school district’s budget is still the largest in the county by far. By comparison, county government’s total 2018 budget is $17,070,442.
Saving for a rainy day
The healthiest fund in the school district currently is the transportation fund.
“It’s just because of the way it’s managed. That goes from you all (school board), all the way down to the bus drivers. The income, the revenues, they spent it wisely. The cash balance increases each year,” Harris said.
The transportation department takes care of a lot of the work that needs to be done on buses in-house when possible, Hammack said.
Transportation department staff, including department director Roger Cline, also pick up bus routes to avoid paying for substitutes.
The transportation and bus-replacement funds will receive a 4-percent increase in revenue because of the state growth quotient increase, a calculation done annually on the health of the economy.
The district plans to purchase and replace three buses next year. It currently owns 31 of them.
Harris said the rainy-day fund looks low for next year, so the district may do a transfer from the healthier transportation fund to help with the extra expenditures that had been taken out of the rainy-day fund causing the balance to decrease.
Historically, the biggest rainy-day fund burden has been health insurance, Hammack said.
The district was making payments for health insurance at around $600,000 to $700,000 a year.
“On a monthly basis, we were not paying the entire bill for our former health insurance carrier. We would pay a percentage of the full bill, then we would wait, pay the balance out of rainy day,” she said. “That practice is not happening anymore, so we don’t have that burden happening at this time. Comparatively, expenditures out of rainy day are remarkably lower.”
An allocation for health insurance is in the school district’s general fund now. Health insurance premiums for school staff were also raised after the school district picked Anthem as their health insurance carrier earlier this year.
“We were collecting a premium that was too low. Getting our new health insurance program up and running, now our premium dollars match what’s actually going out. We’re able to kind of now run with numbers that at least make sense to us,” Hammack said.
When the decision was made this year to freeze the use of bond money, rainy day fund money had to be used to pay for costs that were being paid with bond money.
“We are wanting to be more intentional about building in what we know are ongoing expenses in the general fund or in CPF (capital projects fund), or wherever it’s supposed to be, as opposed to using rainy day to kind of pick up these extraneous (expenses). … We’re hoping to build our cash balance back up with that practice.”
The district’s capital projects fund levy is about $1.7 million — close to the 2017 budget — with a budget around $2.9 million. For the 2017 budget, capital projects was advertised at $5.5 million.
The future
In May, the school board voted unanimously to cut the 2017 budget by nearly $1 million.
Paraprofessional jobs were reduced; all five certified preschool teachers were replaced with instructors who hold associate degrees, with the certified teachers being assigned elsewhere in the district; the cost of substitute teachers was moved to the capital projects fund by contracting with an outside company to hire them; and the district cut back on travel for professional development.
“I know that was a really challenging period, but I feel like it was responsible and the right thing for us to do,” Hammack said.
“It’s about this time of year that we start seeing the effects of what was put into place. I will tell you they look very good,” Harris said of the previous cuts and current budget. “We really stuck to our guns and the results are really positive.”
Hammack told school board members that the district is in a “good spot.”
“I want to caution the board that we are probably not yet still where we want to be. We understand the number of students needs to match the number of folks we employ,” she said.
From now on, the district will be in a “perpetual mode” of always analyzing jobs that become available to see if they need to be filled.
“It’s going to get harder and harder now. We’re going to get to a place where it’ll get tough, but we need to be vigilant and get ourselves to a place where we can sleep at night and think, ‘OK, the dollars that we’re receipting are matching the dollars that are going out,’” Hammack said.
“When we get to that point, that’s going to be a really, really good day. I feel like we’re doing the things we need to do to get there.”
