The Bulloch County Board of Education is looking at a proposed $140.2 million fiscal year 2024 general fund budget as the school system begins spending down a massive $59 million fund balance from special federal cash received during the COVID years.
As part of this, Bulloch County Schools will continue delivering on previously awarded raises for all employees. These include a $2,500 boost in local supplement for teachers and other certified educators and a locally funded $3-an-hour raise for non-certified school employees, which Superintendent Charles Wilson proposed in January and board members agreed to make retroactive to the beginning of the calendar year. In addition, the school system’s budget shows the pass-through effect of the $2,000 state raise for certified educators Gov. Brian Kemp proposed in January.
Besides covering the raises, the budget proposal also shifts some payroll and other expenses back to the general fund that three years ago were transferred to special budgets for federal funding received under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act of 2020, and similar legislation.
During a Thursday evening, April 27, Board of Education work session, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Troy Brown noted that, two or three years ago, he and Wilson had explained the strategy of a five-year financial plan. First, qualifying expenses were to be reclassified to the special accounts while regular state and local revenues were allowed to accumulate in the general fund, driving its fund balance up. Second, at a certain point in the process the school system would shift those expenses back to the general fund and begin spending down its accumulated, record balance.
“As you’ll see, we’re working that same plan,” Brown told the board last week. “We drove our fund balance up to a high level, and now we’re at that point where the CARES funds we’ve received, we’ve obtained almost all of those CARE funds, spending them, and now we’re spending down that fund balance to get back down to a level close to where it was when we began this process.”
Brown projects that the school system’s general fund will begin the new fiscal year with a balance of $59.1 million, which amounts to 42% of the proposed spending.
But that spending exceeds the projected new revenue by $8.44 million, and so would reduce the balance to $50.6 million – still a historically large amount – by June 30, 2024. Of that, $6.5 million would be carried over as a reserve for spending by the individual schools, further reducing the unrestricted fund balance to $44.2 million.
The $140.2 million in general-fund spending proposed for fiscal 2024 amounts to a $22.7 million, or 19.3%, increase over the school system’s actual spending in the 2023 fiscal year, ending June 30. But since expenditures in the current fiscal year had already increased from the originally budgeted $107.4 million to a revised estimate of $117.5 million, the proposed $140.2 million spending for fiscal 2024 reflects an increase of about 30% over the current year’s original general-fund budget.
The $3 raise for non-certified employees is projected to cost $1.1 million more for the year; the $2,500 local supplement boost for certified educators, $1.3 million; and the pass-through state teacher raise $1.54 million. But salaries transferred back from the special CARES-related funds add almost $4.9 million spending back to the general fund.
Benefits and health insurance increases also add almost $5 million.
When the school board’s other budgets, including those for school nutrition, special revenues, capital projects and debt service, are added to the general fund, the budgets total $176.1 million.
May 11 & June 8
The budget is slated for further consideration at the board’s May 11 regular meeting, when Wilson may ask the board for a vote of tentative approval. The budget could then be advertised for final adoption at the June 8 meeting.