SF Week 3 Part 4

Week Three Assignment, Part 4 – Reviewing and analyzing your district’s Maintenance & Operations Fund

Maintenance and Operations is based on the total WADA reported in the PEMIS report. WADA is based on the number of students attending the school district and the type of students attending the school district. My district’s M&O tax rate is 1.04. The S&I is 0.1966 so that brings the total to 1.2366.  This is the same as last year.  My district has worked very had through this budget crunch to help maintain the educational goals that we have held in past years. Many things have been cut due to the funding allocations, but my district worked to re-implement programs and rehire staff back into the system as funding became available.  To help in keeping the S&I the same this year, our board has called for $1, 450, 00 of existing bond money debt to be used to retire the debt early and save interest cost both to district and taxpayers. We are a Chapter 41 school, but our wealth level per student is up.  State compensatory education is based on 52% for direct instruction.  Our district has $35,035,527.00 in this fund. We have total of 6,230 students in our district. Multiply that by $90 per student and we have $560,700.   In speaking with our financial officer, he believes that our district fund balance is adequate in comparison with other districts like ours. He has provided a new piece in our budget tool that is instructional material allotment breakdown. In organizing our budget each independent area is broken down line by line to help all understand where every penny is spent, using which fund and by which campus. All of our campuses are Title One campuses so Federal funds are used in by district. These funds help us provide educational opportunities to children at risk. These funds are important to our district and every school benefits from these opportunities. We also have Bilingual/ELL, Career and Technology, Gifted and Talented, SPED, Transportation and Food Services allotments that help fund our district’s student needs. Many of these programs were removed in April when the budget was not yet definite. Our Board and District were committed to the children of our community and each of these programs has returned due to good financial planning and spending of our funding. I am not sure that everyone totally understands all the intricacies of the budget process. I know I have learned a great deal during this course and still have more to learn. This is my first year to work with a budget in anyway. In examining our budgetary process for my district I have a deeper appreciation now for who, what, where, when and how funds are allotted and spent. High attendance has always been an important piece of the education puzzle for numerous reasons. The new HB on truancy will also add some muscle to those situations that sometime are very difficult to correct. Our PEMIS snapshot date of attendance was not as high as it could be. I will continue to lead my district in implementing ways to better this number.  Even in comparing our own campus budgets to each other, each have independent needs, but all tie into the district’s goal driven budget. As I delve into the function codes and analyze how every penny must be funded and spent, I see the advantages and disadvantages of how our system is funded and how our students are affected. Our district budget manual is very specific in its design. One of the areas that I look forward to doing is the end of the year evaluation of the budget.  I believe in working with the budget for this year, I will have a better understanding of what my district did, how we went about achieving it and how we can better implement our moneys and programs. When talking to my District Financial Officer he stressed the importance of looking at where things are and identifying the needs of where we need to be. We compared the various types of funding, programs and allotments and he helped me to analyze our financial situation to date. In working through the financial situation of this past summer and these next two years, I am proud to say our Superintendent, Board, and Central Office personnel, Administrators, Staff and Stakeholders value our children and value the education they will receive.  These next two years our budget is sound and the projections for the two after that is sound, pending no state changes.  But we are all learning to operate on a much tighter, much more restricted funding…but we started with a finger for a pencil and dirt for paper.