Partly Cloudy / 71° F
County BOE budget leaves $5K in wiggle room
Published 12:10pm Monday, September 3, 2012Doing more with less is the goal of the Tallapoosa County Board of Educations budget for next year.
The board projects $26,644,000 in revenue with expenditures totaling $26,639,000.
The budget leaves the board $5,000 ahead of their expenditures and funds items that have previously not been included in the board’s budget.
“Our budget is a lean budget, but we put some things in it that we haven’t been doing,” said Phil Blasingame, chief school financial officer. “(In tough economic times) you still have to plan ahead and look down the road. Career tech was a big item in our wish list that we were able to put in the budget this year.”
Superintendent Joe Windle said that funding a career technical center was a goal of his for this year.
“I think what we have done is align our money better,” Windle said. “Although we have less money (than in years past), we have aligned the money we have with our major initiatives.”
Blasingame said the board used last year’s revenue figures in order to form a conservative budget. The board’s revenue varies based on tax collection.
“The revenue we budgeted was the amount we received this year – we didn’t try to guess how much it would increase,” Blasingame said.
The system receives funds from the state, which are doled out based on number of teaching units determined by the average daily membership from the year before. For Fiscal Year 2013, the system lost -2.49 units and will receive $524,694 less revenue from the state than last year.
“The state sends us $11,405,674 (in Foundation Program funds),” Blasingame said. “We have to put up a system match of $3,916,420.”
While the state will be sending Tallapoosa County less money in the form of Foundation Program funds, the systems local match has increased by $210,140.
“The matching money has gone up – it is based on taxes,” Blasingame said. “We are getting less but we have to set aside more for the money we are getting.”
Windle said the board considered how money was benefiting students while they prepared the budget.
“We looked at what we were going to serve our kids, what we were doing to prepare them to be competitive in college and successful in the workplace – the we put our dollars into those areas that will impact the students the most,” Windle said.
