McCurdy Charter School officials will operate with hundreds of thousands of dollars less in their bank account for next fiscal year.
McCurdy’s Governance Board members unanimously approved, at a June 3 meeting, the charter school’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget of $3.94 million. Next year’s funds are $440,000 less than this year’s budget of $4.3 million.
Board President Deborah Anderson said she was glad to have approved the budget, after various community budget hearings, which were held since March.
“I feel like we had a lot of opportunity for parental and community input,” Anderson said. “There was a whole set of meetings set up. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of responders, but we made the opportunity available.”
According to the final budget document, $3.07 million of the total budget for next year will come from the school’s appropriation, based on its State Equalization Guarantee. This is computed by the state Public Education Department based on factors such as enrollment.
This amount is about $10,000 less than this year’s state appropriation of $3.08 million. This represents about 80 percent of the total budget.
Anderson said the slight decrease is caused by a minor reduction in the charter school’s enrollment.
“It (the state appropriation) is slightly less because we have 528 students and last year, we had projected we would get 545 and we didn’t get quite that many,” Anderson said. “We have 520 kids right now and we budgeted for 530 next year.”
Besides the state funding, charter school officials will also see a decrease in grant funding next year. They budgeted $99,000 in Title I funding, which is $93,000 less than this year’s $192,000.
The school’s IDEA-B funding will total $88,000 next year, which is $86,000 less than this year’s $174,000, while next year’s teacher and principal training professional development award will total $24,000, which is $23,000 less than this year’s $47,000.
Officials will receive $50,000 in Reads to Lead K-3 funding, the same amount as this year’s.
Unlike this year, they will not receive money from the state Public School Capital Outlay Council. They got $399,000 in Council funding for FY 2015.
As for next year’s expenses, Anderson said officials don’t plan to have any drastic cuts.
“I don’t know if there’s a big change,” she said. “There isn’t really any substantive change. It’s just working to get the number of students that we have. This is a very conservative number for projecting the budget.”
For next year, officials budgeted $1.84 million for teachers’ salaries and benefits. About $1.3 million will be spent for teachers’ compensation, while $540,000 will be for various employee benefits.
Another $1.24 million was budgeted for support services, such as counseling and educational assistants.
Officials project a $168,000 expenditure on food services for next fiscal year, which is $8,000 less than this year’s $176,000.
They project a $144,000 budget for athletics next year, a change of $114,000 from this fiscal year.
As part of the athletics expenses, they budgeted $10,000 for coach salaries, for which they didn’t allot money this year, and $25,000 for team travel costs, an increase of $20,000 from this year’s $5,000.
Officials also budgeted $134,000 for capital improvements, which is $12,000 less than this year’s.
McCurdy Human Resources Manager Carrie Vigil said although Board members approved the budget at the meeting, they chose to table the salary schedule because of some confusion.
She said with the budget approved, officials will have to submit the document to Department officials before June 20 for final approval.
Because the school’s budget greatly depends on the enrollment numbers, Anderson said officials plan to strive to get more students at McCurdy, through more community outreach, this coming year. She’s counting on newsletters and word of mouth.
“As we get closer to the summer, there will be other means of communication to increase enrollment,” she said.