Schools get some unexpected cash

 

Last updated 5/2/2006 at Noon



Sometimes good things do come in threes. The Sisters School District received that many pieces of good financial news in recent days. As a result, the district will have at least $230,000 more than it expected for the current year (2005-06) and an estimated $265,000 more than it anticipated for 2006-07.

The first and most immediately important chunk of money is coming because the district is enrolling more students for the current year than originally estimated. When that increase was cranked into the formula on which the state bases its allocations to schools, the amount due for Sisters was bumped up by about $230,000.

That is still an estimate; the exact amount won’t be known until the state makes its last major distribution of school funds for the year this month.

Although this revenue was not budgeted, it is not a complete surprise. Sisters School Supt. Ted Thonstad says that as enrollment reports have been coming in during the year he has been “adjusting dollars up. We figured there’d be something there but we had no idea how much” it would be.

To allow the money to be spent this year the school board on April 24 adopted a supplemental budget which, in effect, adds the new money to the budget and makes it available for use.

The money being received for this year has actually already been spent. Thonstad explained that it was used to hire three new teachers for 2005-06, one each for the high school, middle school and elementary school. Two educational aides were included in the package, one for the fifth grade and one for Spanish classes in the high school.

“I told the board I was going to gamble a little” after early reports indicated the district’s enrollment would turn out to be higher than anticipated, Thonstad said. “I knew we were going to have more students than we had budgeted for.”

The increased enrollment intensified the need for more staff at the same time it created the probability that the state would boost the district’s fiscal support this year by an amount that would be likely to pay for additional teachers and aides.

The end of the story is that Thonstad won his gamble.

In case the actual amount received is even more, the supplemental figure was pegged at $260,597. But Thonstad said he doesn’t expect the district to spend more than $230,000 and legally it can’t spend more than it receives. Any amount above the $230,000 will probably be carried over as part of the beginning balance for next year.

The second piece of good news, which was a surprise, emerged from the one-day special session of the Legislature held late last month. While the main purpose of the session was to cover a growing deficit in the state’s human services budget, several other actions were taken, including the appropriation of some $42 million in lottery money to the schools.

This is money above the amount of lottery revenue expected for the current biennium, caused by the success of adding slot machine-style line games to the lottery’s video games. Until now, the online system was limited to video poker. The slot-style games were added in May last year.

Sisters schools expect to receive between $90,000 and $100,000 from the lottery bonus. The Oregon Department of Education has put out no specific numbers yet, but the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators has published estimates that put Sisters at $100,000. Thonstad says, however, that a statewide increase in enrollment upon which the new distribution will be based may lower the local receipt closer to $90,000.

In any case, the lottery money received here will be carried over to 2006-07 and will probably wind up helping to pay for increased staffing (see related story, page 7) .

The same use will be made of the third element of the financial picture, an estimated $165,000 that is coming because of higher than expected school property tax receipts for the current year. Some other money may be part of the allocation, which again should be received this month. It all relates to the complex equalizing formula by which the state accounts for local property taxes when calculating how much to give each district.

Thonstad said, “We will do the same thing with that that we’ll do with the lottery money, use it next year. It will give us a chance to add staff…and there’s always other things. We may use (some of) it to refund the contingency fund. And costs are going up for supplies and all that stuff. I’m not worried about finding places to use it.”

Although the central office staff has been crunching numbers for some time, formal work on the budget for the 2006-07 fiscal year will start with an intitial workshop of the district budget committee, May 8.

 

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