After a partial audit by the Kansas Department of Education, the Emporia school district has reason to believe it will receive more state funds than originally believed.
The district had planned for the worst and hoped for the best when it set its 2008-09 budget estimate at $32,139,693. During a study session Wednesday evening at Mary Herbert Education Center, board members heard that the figure could be approximately $32,988,170.
"The present reality is that we have money to meet the obligation of a negotiated agreement which said we were going to take salaries up to 3 percent," Superintendent John Heim said.
A 3 percent raise, instead of the budgeted 1.5 percent for all staff, would cost the district about $422,450, Heim estimated.
"That's the good news," he said. "We definitely will have enough money to do that.
Representatives of the Interest Based Bargaining teams will meet Tuesday afternoon at Mary Herbert to discuss the topic.
Early in the meeting, Heim talked to the board about the "state of the state" and cautioned them about state budget shortfalls that are expected for the current fiscal year. Heim had talked with state education officials about the situation today.
"As of today, the state is about $19 million behind in revenue," Heim said. "That's on a fiscal year. But that's sort of the good news.
"The bad news is that they are budgeting for negative balances on ... July 1st. It's really only some accounting tricks that allows them to finish with a positive balance on June 30."
Because of the unknown enrollment ramifications caused by Tyson Fresh Foods' elimination of up to 1,700 jobs here earlier this year, the Kansas legislature enacted a bill that provided a two percent floor for the Emporia school district. The buoying up of the district's budget was intended to prevent a potentially serious budget crisis if many former Tyson workers moved out and school enrollment dropped too precipitously.
"They put $59 per student in a lockbox for us," Heim said. "Now some of the prognosticators are saying we shouldn't count on getting that."
Assistant Superintendent of Finance Rob Scheib gave the board a detailed explanation of the budgeting that had been done for this year, the changes that have come because of "weighting" or extra funds granted in a variety of categories, and different scenarios that could play out in the next few years, depending upon enrollment and the categories that carry weighting funds.
Preliminary estimates that resulted from an early preliminary state audit show, with weightings included, the district will be paid for 7,441.5 FTE students. With state aid set at $4,433 per pupil -- up $59 from the previous year -- the district should receive an estimated $32,988.17.
"If they took away bilingual, transportation, food service, all the weightings we get from the state ... this is how much we'd have to run our school district: $19,762,757.30," Scheib said.
Read the full story in Tuesday's Gazette.
goodoleboy (anonymous) says...
3% raise does not begin to cover the cost of living nowadays. If you want to keep and retain good teachers you will have to do better, sickens me how well this district trains teachers that move on to other jobs.
October 21, 2008 at 3:05 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
create (anonymous) says...
I agree. 3% is not enough. Even social security got 5.8% cost of living raise recently to begin Jan. 1. Teachers deserve more, especially after all the extra work they've been doing to bring up district scores. Of course, as usual every politician crows about how teachers need to be paid more. They never tell you it's a local decision and not up to them. When NCLB was introduced, the amount of extra work and loads of time involved was tremendous yet teacher salaries were never commensurate.
October 21, 2008 at 6:30 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
kseyetie (anonymous) says...
"When NCLB was introduced, the amount of extra work and loads of time involved was tremendous yet teacher salaries were never commensurate." === It is difficult to equate federal funds to teacher salaries, although some of the title money is used this way. NCLB was supposed to be funded to help schools meet the challenges being added to the load. So far, the feds are something like $60+ billion dollars behind what they suggested they would pony up when the law was passed in 2001.
October 21, 2008 at 8:09 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )