Despite a recommendation from the superintendent during a special June 11 meeting, the Española School Board instead did things their way and voted to reject the revised $32 million budget for the upcoming academic year. The Board disagreed with the proposed changes made by the state and felt it had a better sense of the needs of the District.
“Mr. President I want to qualify my vote for the record,” Board member Pablo Lujan said. “We went through this budget to the T. I commend the business office and I commend the superintendent and this Board for the amount of time that we spent on this budget and to me, I think we did a good, diligent job on it.”
Lujan then had some choice words for the state.
“Like I stated before, PED (Public Education Department) should not control how we do our budget,” Lujan said. “If this District had gone for additional emergency funding for any reason, I think that would justify them telling us how to manage our budget. We are all elected. We hold the due diligence to our tax payers, to our community and that is the reason I voted no.”
School Board President Lucas Fresquez also weighed in after Lujan.
“Well said, Mr. Lujan,” Fresquez said. “We did put forth the effort to approve a balanced budget. We spent a lot of time working on it. I don’t see why they are giving us a hard time.”
Even prior to the vote, there were questions concerning the changes to the budget.
Lujan noticed a $200,000 discrepancy between the original budget and the revised budget. District Finance Director Jeannette Trujillo attributed that difference to a reimbursement that had not come in yet.
In fact, there were a number of changes made to the original budget. One change was mandated by the Public Education Department. The Department wanted to increase the District’s cash reserve fund from three-and-a-half percent of the budget to five percent.
The superintendent also wanted to increase the legal fees budget because of a pending case the District is involved with.
“Now we are increasing it by $25,000 but that one case alone, and that’s confidential, you are talking about $225,000 for one case,” Trujillo said. “We’ll see how the case goes, so hopefully that is the high end.”
Adding a full-time music teacher was the final change that was proposed. Some schools, such as Dixon Elementary School, Velarde Elementary School and Alcalde Elementary School, did not have a music program and the superintendent wanted to change that.
Including benefits, adding an instructor would add about $65,000 to the budget.
The largest portion of the budget, almost $18 million, was allocated to instruction such as teacher salaries and equipment. Regular operation and maintenance expenses, about $5.5 million, was the next largest expense. Those two categories alone consume just over 70 percent of the budget.
Following the vote, Trujillo had discussions with the Public Education Department to resolve the impasse. The Department went with the decision of the Board, except for the cash reserve requirement. The Department insisted the cash reserves be increased to five percent of the total budget.
As a result, Trujillo recommended the reimbursement the District was supposed to receive later this summer be redirected to the reserve budget.
The reimbursement would be $670,000 and depositing all of the proceeds would put the reserve fund at eight percent of the total budget — more than the amount the state mandated.