School board approves amended budget

It took only seven minutes for the Newton Community School District to approve an amended budget for the 2014-15 school year. Wrestling with the 2015-16 budget, however, could prove to be a far more daunting and time-consuming task.

At Tuesday night’s special meeting, held in the Emerson Hough conference room, the board voted unanimously to approve changes to two items in its 2014-15 budget, based on actual expenditures — thus completing the only item on Tuesday’s agenda.

The district’s director of business services, Gayle Isaac, said the first of the two items was for food service and the other is for debt service and refinancing the district’s bond debt.

“What we’re looking at is two lines, or two functionality codes, of our total budget,” Isaac said.

Isaac said the state Department of Education strongly encourages school districts to “spend down” on food service balances, so Food Service Supervisor Cristy Croson has been purchasing new equipment and making other necessary expenditures in order to use up the fund.

Not only does the food-service fund not affect local taxes or any other funds, Superintendent Bob Callaghan explained, but the purchases of new equipment improve the safety and/or efficiency of food service in the district.

The non-instructional programs section makes up less than 4 percent of the total NCSD budget, on average, over the past couple of fiscal years.

Isaac said the other line item, listed as “total other expenditures” on the budget the board approved at its April 13 meeting, is nearly one-third of the district’s budget, but there are several components to that item. Land transactions and refinanced bond debt are a part of the line item.

The district is set to pay off a bond on June 1.

Callaghan said the budget for the fiscal year of 2015-16 awaits the outcome of ongoing teachers union negotiations as well as the outcome of state legislative aid for K-12 schools. State education aid was supposed to have been set long ago, but the state legislature is still greatly at odds about a funding formula for either 2015-16 or 2016-17.

State law guarantees schools 101 percent of the funding from the previous budget cycle, defaulting to that amount if the legislature fails to agree on a formula by June 30. Last year, the legislature passed a 2014-15 budget for K-12 schools with just hours to spare.

Last week, the House Appropriations Committee this week passed a school funding bill for Fiscal Year 2017 (for the 2016-17 school year), approving a 2 percent increase in school funding — an increase of $125.2 million, on top of the 1.25 percent proposed by the Democratic leadership. However, it isn’t clear when or if the Republican-majority House will bring the proposal to the floor for a full vote.

Callaghan said after Tuesday’s meeting that growing school districts such as Waukee, Ankeny, Urbandale and Norwalk, where enrollment is growing rapidly each year, a 1.25 percent increase will amount to substantial funding, as the formula is based on the number of students in each district.

However, for districts such as Newton, which is showing little enrollment change year to year, a 1.25 percent increase in funding wouldn’t even allow Newton to meet growing expenses.

At last week’s board meeting, Callaghan and Isaac presented a grim financial portrait of the district’s general fund, including salaries, and a personnel report presented at the meeting eliminates at least four positions and includes 10 involuntary transfers. The district’s 2015-16 budget, which counts on zero new dollars from the legislature, would leave Newton with a $503,180 less revenue than it did last year.

The 1.25 percent funding formula would still leave the district $460,772 short of last year’s state aid. Callaghan said the proposed $55-million, one-time state aid “boost,” when combined with the 1.25 percent increase in annual aid, would put Newton in the black by about $338,000.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com