Agenda - 09-22-2011 - 1 - Laserfiche WebLink

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s Chapel Hill - Carrboro City Schools 2011-12 Operating Budget Message The State and Local budgets.have been finalized and the Board of Education adopted the district's 2011-12 operating budget on July 21, 2011. Once again, we were fortunate that the final state budget was not quite as bad as originally proposed. We were well prepared to cushion the major reductions that we did experience. Although our district incurred a $5.75 million reduction in funding from the state, this reduction was approximately $2.1 million less than we would have experienced under the initial Senate budget. Nevertheless, this will be the third yeaz in a row that the state budget has been significantly reduced. and the third yeaz in a row that it does not provide any salary or wage increase for our staff. At the local level, the County Commissioners continued their support of education and formally approved aper-pupil appropriation to the two Orange County school districts that was $6 higher than last year. This did not fully fund our original request because our state enrollment projection for 2011- 12 was lower than 2010-11. Over the past two years through careful budgeting and spending restraints, the district was able to build up its undesignated fund balance to help buffer state and local reductions. The district will be using an additional $2.6 million from its undesignated fund balance in order to avoid program and resource reductions and retain needed staff members. It will be important to remember that this is a one time source of funding and unless local and state revenues increase significantly in the near future, program and staff reductions will be extremely likely next yeaz. The district experienced a variety of cost increases due to mandated state changes with health insurance and retirement rate contributions as well as the continuation of critical services and positions associated with federal grant funding and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding that expired on June 30, 2011. A summary of these cost increase adjustments is listed below: State Mandates Anticipated increase in employee health insurance - (from $4929 to $4931) $ 1,500 Anticipated increase in employer state retirement match (from 10.51% to 13.12%) $ 447,392 Subtotal $ 448,892 Continuation of Current Services Physical Education/Athletics Coordinator $ 75,000 Retain Exceptional Children positions currently funded by ARRA grants $ 500.000 Subtotal $ 575,000 Total of Mandates and Continuation Budget Requests $1,023,892 The Boazd approved a limited number of expansion requests to maintain our high quality Exceptional Education programm;ng and to provide support for technology resources at the high schools. Additional funding was provided to the Transportation Department to staff new buses needed to support all of our district programs. The expansion requests are presented below. Expansion Requests