County school officials optimistic about new budget
The Franklin County School Board passed their annual budget on Tuesday, and for the first time since 2008, officials are optimistic that the school system will finish the upcoming fiscal year with a positive balance.
FCS financial officer Carla Knight presented the proposed $33 million budget to school board members at their meeting last week.
Knight said her projections showed the school system should end fiscal year 2013-2014 with a balance of $800,000 – a far cry from the balance of negative $5 million the system started out with for fiscal year 2012-2013.
“There were several things that helped us move forward and helped us get back to seeing a positive balance,” Knight said.
“One thing that we were able to do was reclassify our $4 million debt that was issued due to proration from short term to long term, which means we don’t have to show the debt as a liability in the current year we are in.
“It doesn’t mean we have a lot more money than before, but it does make the numbers look better when we can classify the debt this way.”
She said during the last year, the system also had several plans in place to cut down on costs that have helped the system move out of the red.
“One of the big things that helped us was Russellville City Schools making the change to transporting their own students,” Knight said. “We also sold them 12 new busses that we owed money on, which allowed us to decrease even more debt that we had.
“Other than that, we just made changes in several areas and tried to save money anywhere we could. One thing that helped was the retirements of some personnel where we didn’t have to hire replacements because we consolidated some of those positions.”
Knight said the financial struggle the school system has faced and will continue to face for several years is a direct result of the three years of proration the system faced in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Knight said during those three years, the school system had to borrow over $4 million to cover the expenses they were cut due to state-mandated proration.
“Many people think that if a school can get through a year of proration, they’ll be fine until another proration is declared, but that isn’t the case,” Knight said.
“We don’t just get out of the woods once proration is over. Those three years of proration have basically cost us 10 years of being in debt from the $4 million we had to borrow.”
Knight said once the school system is placed on proration or their funding is reduced, it isn’t as simple as laying off teachers or support personnel to make up the difference.
“In the education system, we have a Foundation Program that tells us we must have a certain number of teachers based on the number of students we have enrolled in our school system,” Knight said.
“That number isn’t negotiable. If they say we have to have 40 teachers, or teaching units, we must have that number. Period.
“The problem comes when we face funding cuts or proration. We’re being told that we have to have a certain number of teachers, but we aren’t getting the funding to pay for all of them, so we have to start funding some of them with local money.
“During the years of proration, it became necessary for us to borrow that $4 million just for us to make payroll to support our teaching units. It has been a constant struggle but we are slowly but surely moving in a positive direction.”
During Knight’s budget presentation on Tuesday, she said the system has gotten the $4 million debt down to $2.9 million.
“It is a great accomplishment to pay the debt down this much in this amount of time,” she said.
Knight said a big thing that has helped, and will continue to help the school system, is the one-cent sales tax they receive. Franklin County residents voted in March 2012 to keep the tax in place for another two years.
“Our system receives a little over $1 million annually from this tax and it’s a tremendous help to us,” Knight said.
“The money is absolutely crucial to help us continue to fight to get out of debt and we appreciate the citizens supporting this one-cent tax. We hope they will continue to support it in the future.”
If the numbers continue to hold up, Knight said she expects the debt to be paid off by 2019.
