Good news on school budget

The new draft of the budget scheduled to be discussed at tonight's Board of Education meeting (7:00 PM looks like once again we are spending less than planned this school year. Originally the plan was to use $5M of our fund balance to balance the budget - now we will only be using $3M of the reserves for the '14-15 school year. Combined with reductions in amounts taken from the tax certiorari, employee benefits, and debt reserves, my calculations show we have about a $2.8M surplus! The budget presentation doesn't make it very clear how much we have in total reserve funds - I believe it is the $27.1M figure shown on slide 14 of tonight's budget presentation. (I believe $13.3M of this is in the general fund, with the remainder in the tax certiorari, employee benefits, debt reserves, and potentially other restricted funds.)

(Slide 13 is particularly misleading because it shows the total reserve fund balance as a percentage of the annual district budget, not the amount of the budget that is actually being funded with withdrawals from reserve funds.)

$975,000 in potential cuts have been identified in the event that we don't get any increase in state funding this year - but except for the reduction from 18 coaches to 16, all of these are not actually "cuts" to existing programs, but rather, modifications or eliminations of proposed additions. Questions/comments:

- What's the $30,000 "PSAT/SAT (SUNY)" for? Originally I thought this was to subsidize the test administration fees for all high school students, but that already happened this year and this is apparently a new item - unless the test administration fees were covered by an alternate funding source this year that won't be available again. Or is it a test prep program?

- $100,000 savings from cutting approximately 205 new health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act Mandate - maybe I am misunderstanding the use of the term "mandate" here, but I was unaware that compliance with the new health care laws was optional?

- $170,000 savings from dropping JROTC - looks like this program was never one of the administration's top priorities. Now that the board member who was the strongest advocate of the program is gone, I imagine this will just fade away into oblivion.

And, of course, we are still being asked to spend almost the entire $5M capital fund (which came from the sale of two buildings last year) on various capital improvements to district buildings and a new high school athletic complex with a synthetic turf field. The various building improvements listed all seem worthy - but it's interesting how the total cost of the project has gone up from $6.3M (as originally proposed in May) to $9.9M now. The increase in scope combined with the last-minute addition of the extravagant athletic complex give me the impression that the administration is intent on spending all the money in the capital fund, just because it's there. I know $5M is a drop in the bucket when viewed in terms of the proposed $199M high school, but wouldn't it be more fiscally prudent to apply at least some of those funds to the high school project? Also, note that the $199M high school project we will be voting on in November includes the athletic complex - but if we vote yes on the athletic complex in May, the high school construction costs won't necessarily decrease - undoubtedly, the district will spend everything they've been authorized to borrow, and then, if history is any indication, they'll come back for more when construction goes over budget.

Overall, the financial news is pretty good: unlike several other local urban districts, we are not experiencing "fiscal stress." Of course, we are also the only local district with three schools failing academically...

Finally - state has set the tax cap at 2.26% for next year.

Update: just noticed weird discrepancy in the budget presentation. Slide 6 shows $17K additional savings in expenses from the February 26 budget draft and $150K additional revenue from the February 26 budget draft; however, slide 7 shows a $256K increase in expenses and a $652K decrease in revenue from the February 26 budget draft. Unclear why the difference in figures?