The summer was a stressful time for schools across the state as they prepared their budgets for the upcoming school year. There were same major changes implemented into the school finance funding formula imposed by the state legislators during the last session.
The first major change was the passage of HB 647. This change took a large share of the state’s portion of school funding away from the school districts. For Big Sandy it was $185,000. The state will now keep this money and they shifted the tax burden to the local taxpayers. This was a major tax shift and placed the tax burden on the local taxpayers and away from the state. It was implemented by the legislature and your local trustees can’t do anything about it. Most schools across the Hi-Line region were heavily impacted by this change.
The other change was that if the state revenue fell below a certain level it would trigger another set of cuts across the state including education. The revenue fell to that level and cuts were implemented recently. All schools were impacted by this most recent cut. For Big Sandy it met a loss of $13,600 to our budget. This was not an unexpected cut and we were prepared to deal with it.
If you recall from previous articles in the Mountaineer earlier this spring with the major tax shift the state imposed we were looking to have to assess 190 mills locally to run our school. That would be similar to the number of mills imposed during the 2010-11 school year. After a great deal of calculating and analyzing the revenue and expenditures for the upcoming year we were able to develop and adopt a budget that will be 170 mills which is considerably lower than what we were expecting. One of the major components that helped us keep our mills in check was that the taxable valuation of the school district went up 11% which means it takes fewer mills to generate the same number of dollars.
The trustees have been able to keep the taxes very level over the past several years and that was the goal again for this year. With the major cuts and changes to education funding by the state legislature that was not possible. If the state had not imposed the tax shift and left funding as it had been we would have seen our taxes remain the same or possibly lower then years past. Until there is a change in state revenue and school finance laws this is what we are faced to deal with for this year and next year at least until the state legislature meets again. Our entire school budget will be posted on the school webpage when available later this fall. School finance is incredibly complicated and ever changing, but if you have any questions feel free to stop by or give me a call.
