School district begins to hone annual budget
With newer projections provided to the School District of Lee County, its Finance Department was able to balance the tentative budget for 2023-24 that is set to have its first reading today, July 31.
Director of Budget Kelly Letcher said the district received its second budget calculation, which puts the district at $2,444,171,374, which includes $1,143,749,696 in the General Fund, or 47 percent of the budget, and $876,000,000 in the capital, 36 percent of the budget.
“Over the last multiple years our numbers have grown,” she said of student growth.
The preliminary numbers are 104,000 students, a 4.391 percent increase, which includes 88,000 students in district schools or Lee Virtual School, 12,000 students in charter schools and 3,000 students utilizing scholarships.
Chief Financial Officer Dr. Ami Desamours said the fourth calculation for last year had 99,979 students. This year, she said the difference is 4,400 FTE.
The projected net funding change between fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024 in adjustments for restricted funds includes a $72.8 million increase.
“That increase was due to teacher salaries and other categoricals were about $2 million. About $9.6 million was set aside for categorical,” Letcher said.
In addition, she said charter schools had a growth of $5.3 million, the Family Empowerment Scholarship went up to $13.9 million and they set aside another $2 million to contingency reserve.
The district also provided projections of new cost, which was a total increase of $55,473,207. Broken down that was $15,943,540 for growth for traditional school; $8,310,640 for increase in Florida Retirement System rate; $10,915,027 for Dependent Care Health Insurance Increase; $8,304,000 for board share employee health insurance increase; and $12,000,000 for property insurance increase.
Letcher said that brought the budget deficit to about $13 million. She said the things they still did not know anything about was salary increases for staff and potential FEFP proration.
“I will tell you that we received our second calculation and we already had our first proration of $819,000,” she said, adding that they have not even counted one student yet. “It was interesting to see.”
Desamours said they have worked since then to help balance the budget. She said first they were able to finalize the property quotes, which had an increase, an increase less than the estimate.
“We were basically able to add $17.1 million back into the calculation because that property increase was not as high as we had originally had,” Desamours said, adding that they were able to move some expenses and that allowed them to save $3.4 million in the general fund.
She said they revised the salary budget, as well, by examining what they had budgeted and knowing there would be some anticipated vacancies, which garnered $5 million.
In addition, the second calculation they received from the state, as far as the certified tax roll as of July 19, an additional $4.3 million was put into the general fund.
With the calculations, it gave the district close to $20 million added back into its estimates, giving them about a $6.2 million fund balance, which helped the district balance the tentative budget.
Superintendent Dr. Christopher Bernier said they know several things about the new proximity plan for elementary schools, which will ultimately help the budget. He said the proximity change reduced the need of drivers from 729 to 600, but due to the number of vacancies every driver is still employed.
In addition, the proximity plan reduced the amount of daily route miles by just under 15,000 miles per day, which at 4 miles to the gallon will save the district money.
“It appears that will reduce the lengths of all of our routes by 15 minutes per each route for elementary,” Bernier said. “We have some projections that are in the millions of dollars, but rather than releasing a number today we would like to work with transportation and see how the first few days of school go to bring projections to you. We did proximity to get students to school on time, but one of the intended consequences of it was also that we would have more operational dollars. Transportation feeds off the General Fund. That is the same number that goes to teacher salaries, teacher benefits and support professionals. The more cost efficient we can be in transportation the more we can transfer those dollars to the board’s priorities.”
The second and final budget hearing is set for Sept. 6 at 5:05 p.m.