Included in the materials for last night’s school board meeting was the usual month-end financial statement for the school system, except this was was for the month ending June 30, which is also the end of the fiscal year.

Budgeting is partly an art form; there are always unknowns, such as our approval last night for adding a half-time teacher assistant at the high school to serve one student. Federal funding for such extraordinary IDEA expenses is based on the student count at the end of last year, but this student just moved in. So, we bear the extra cost for the rest of the year, in spite of the fact that it’s a federally-mandated expense. We also added a kindergarten teacher at Woodland, due to the arrival of 23 more students than we expected.
Feel free to download the financial report and study it. The first half of the first page is the school system’s revenues; you can see what we budgeted to receive, what we actually received, the percentage of the budgeted amount, and the variance from the budgeted amount. Under revenues, it’s better to see numbers not in parenthesis… the parenthesis means we got that much less than expected.

Pay attention to percentages that are far above or below 100%. For example, line item 47143 — revenue for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) closed out the year at 56.2%. Not only is the federal government not paying it’s fair share, but we only received a little more than half of what was expected — the unfair share.

The bottom half of the first page is expenditures. Here, it’s much better to see a number in parenthesis at the end… that means we spent less than we budgeted. All in all, we received $394,649 more than anticipated (0.95%), and spent $857,242 less than budgeted (2.1%), so we ended with a small amount that goes into the fund balance.

We’ll need it; we always do, because our budget is inadequate to really put the money into maintenance and repair that we ought to, so when something breaks, the fund balance is where it comes from.

As these are public records, feel free to download or print to your heart’s content.