School district depending on student count to help budget

Highest funded pupil count in district’s history

Gunnison Watershed school district administrators are finding some familiar challenges, along with some unexpected opportunities, in funding the upcoming school year. While under-funding is still a concern, it’s not as big a concern as it once was. And in an environment where students mean money, it’s shaping up to be a banner year.

“The interesting thing to look at next year is our head count. We’re expecting our largest number of students in the Gunnison school district in history,” district business manager Stephanie Juneau said of the 1,744 students expected next year, at a presentation of the draft budget to the school board on Monday, May 13. “That translates to the highest funded pupil count we’ve seen in history. So that’s good as far as an increase in funding goes.”
Juneau also told the board that the amount of money the district gets from the state for operational expenses per pupil is going to increase for the first time in several years, to about $6,400 per student. That, however, is still down from just three years ago, when the district received $7,200 per student.
Counting all sources of revenue, the district’s general fund revenues are expected to be $14.7 million, down from $14.8 million this year. The district’s total program funding would have been $13.6 million had it not been for the share the state has been keeping in the form of “negative factors” in the funding formula.
The negative factors are generally monies that the state had been allocating to school districts but stopped due to budget concerns at the state level. Next year the state will hold on to about $2.1 million, bringing the district’s program funding to around $11.5 million.
“The good news is that [negative factor] isn’t increasing,” Juneau said. “But the bad news is that we’re still under-funded by $2.1 million next year … So while it is up and we’re reversing that trend, we’re not reversing it enough to overcome the negative factor.” And she was quick to remind the board that the $2.1 million wasn’t a cumulative number, but a perennial lack of state funding that’s starting to take a toll on the district’s finances.
One effect of the continued cutbacks has been an undue pressure on federal money that the district has received, via the county, for federal lands within the district that don’t pay property taxes. That money – $465,000 last year – along with the relief from capital costs that came after a $55 million bond issue, allowed the district to build up its financial reserves. But after four years, the federal money will dry up next year, leaving the school district to pull money from the reserve fund as a one-time fix for maintenance and other costs.
Next year the district’s fund balance will be $2.2 million, or 15.4 percent of the district’s annual operating expenses—a fraction more than the 15 percent the district is required to keep in reserve.
And as expected, the district’s expenses—for a range of things from teacher retirement to health insurance to food service—are anticipated to rise next year. Workers compensation insurance rates increased from $86,000 to $132,000. Although such increases aren’t large relative to the budget, even the relatively minor expenditures are having an impact and despite the recent spending cuts, general fund expenditures are expected to increase next year.
“Total funds available in the general fund will be $16.6 million. So you can see that it’s significantly less than the current year. And our general fund expenditures are, I would say, significantly more next year … All those things do increase our fixed costs,” Juneau said.
In the draft of the budget presented to the board Monday night, Juneau showed that the district’s subsidy of the food service program, which costs the district around $100,000 every year, would increase by more than $63,000 if the district were to keep food prices the same in the schools’ cafeterias. However, the board seemed amenable to her recommendation that the price of school lunch increase next year to offset the additional cost. That’s a decision the state will have to sign off on.
Although the expense of the lunch program doesn’t directly cost the district a teaching position, board member Bill Powell pointed out that it costs the district an average of $62,000 a year to fund a teaching position.
“That increase [in the lunch program subsidy] is equivalent to the average salary of a primary teacher, with benefits and everything else,” he said. “And we’re going from five first-grade teachers in Gunnison this year to four next year … That is something to think about.”
In this draft of the budget, and with contract negotiations between the teachers and the school district over, general fund personnel costs accounted for 84 percent of expenditures, with increases in many of the staff related funds, like insurance and retirement.
Powell asked Juneau for a side-by-side comparison between the previous master contract agreement with teachers and the newly negotiated deal, with notes made “showing the cost or increase in cost to the district for each provision.”
A public presentation of the draft budget is planned for June 3, prior to getting final consideration by the board.