District 117 Treasurer Jamie Hadjan gave a positive budget snapshot for the current school year Wednesday night at the monthly school board meeting. Hadjan says they are currently a little over 66% into the current fiscal year.
Hadjan outlined some of the revenues received for the month of August: “We received in our third payment of property tax, about $1.5 million. We received in the start of evidence-based funding for this year with two payments for $974,000. We received some Corporate Personal Property Replacement Taxes. We received sports training grants. This is the second year of that grant of $21,000 from Passavant Area Hospital Foundation. We apply that towards the athletic trainer [position] that we have through Springfield Clinic. We also received our fourth mandated categorical funding payment from last year. That is tuition for special education and it is also regular and special education transportation. We also received some administrative outreach, which is Medicare reimbursement.”
Hadjan says that a few specific areas of the budget expenses are above budget for the year: “Operations & Maintenance fund, we are above. The reason we are above as of the end of August is because we have had a large order of custodial supplies and we also paid for the fire alarms at Murrayville-Woodson, Washington, and the JHS Fieldhouse. That bumps us over, but we will smooth out. Transportation fund, we are still over but that is also due to the purchase of 2 buses that [the district] paid for in July. That will smooth out as well. Capital projects, I’m going to have to adjust that. We paid out more in capital projects than what I even budgeted for. We paid Henson-Robinson for some roofing work at the Central Office – some final payments on that. We also paid for Gano Electric and Neff-Colvin for the quick Eisenhower Elementary interior walls that had to be put up right before school started. Our Health-Life-Safety [project] for this year is the North Elementary windows. In total, we are at $15.28 million. The budget is running according to plan.”
Hadjan says that the remainder of the North Elementary School windows project should be finished by next month.
Superintendent Steve Ptacek also says that the sales tax revenue that the district collects has significantly rebounded. For last month, the revenue was only down a little over $250 from the previous year compared to the several thousands lost over the last 3 months. Overall, he said the district’s sales tax revenue is down around $95,000 compared to last year. The district uses the revenues to help pay the bond payment for the new school buildings finished from the Vision 117 plan.
Revised numbers and the complete school district’s budget will be available to the public for an upcoming hearing on September 30th in a special school board meeting at 5:30PM in the Central Office Board Room.