Niles Township High School District 219 will not have a final budget in place until September, as school board members decided to table plans to post the tentative spending plan until their July 25 meeting.
Because the tentative budget must be posted for 30 days before it can be approved, the board now expects to approve the budget at its Sept. 12 meeting, after school has started.
They postponed the budget vote to allow administrators to go back and cut proposed spending to levels close to what the district actually expects to need, which will eliminate contingency funds that traditionally had been included in the budget.
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“What the board did is exciting,” said board member Robert Silverman, adding that the board sent staff back to the drawing board at a June 22 finance committee meeting and asked them to make changes to the way they prepare the budget. “The community should be happy with what we did.”
The changes will be made to a first draft of the budget that included $147.3 million in planned spending, which could have raised the district’s operating expense per pupil to more than $26,000, a 7.63 percent increase.
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Revenue in the original draft was projected to rise 4.33 percent to $152.8 million, with 95 percent coming from local sources—chiefly property taxes.
The changes will include holding the line on administrator salaries, which will be slightly lower next year, as well as purchased services and supplies, Silverman said.
“We need to budget as tightly as possible,” he said.
The changes could come with some consequences, however, if emergencies arise and require additional spending. If the district has to exceed its leaner budget, it will have to pass a budget amendment during the fiscal year. Such an amendment would also have to be posted for 30 days, said Paul O’Malley, the assistant superintendent for business services.
If the district had to spend non-budgeted money right away—say, if a boiler needed to be replaced immediately—the district would have to spend money from another budget category and then replace it with a budget amendment, O’Malley explained.
Silverman said that makes sense.
“That’s the way a family budget works,” he said.
The district also will look at ways to increase the average daily attendance of students, which would have the dual effect of increasing the amount of money the district receives from the state and reducing the per-pupil operating expenses. District 219’s average daily attendance last year was slightly lower than the state average.
School board members have focused on operating expense per pupil because it was second highest in the state for high school districts in 2009, the last year for which complete statewide numbers are available.
