By Emma Rausch
emma@thepaperofwabash.com
WABASH COUNTY, Ind. – Budget discussions began at the MSD of Wabash County Board of Education meeting Tuesday evening, July 11.
The board reviewed potential budgets for the Rainy Day Fund, Transportation Fund, Debt Services account and the School Pension Debt account for the 2018 school years.
Chris Kuhn, MSD assistant superintendent of finance, presented drafts of the funds as follows:
• The Rainy Day Fund: $730,000
• The Transportation Fund: $ 1,878,900
• The Debt Service: $2,740,094
• The School Pension Debt: $202,068
Kuhn advised the board that the Transportation Fund account’s figure will change before the budget is finalized due to tax cap influences, which have not been released as of Tuesday. However, all the funds are subject to change until the budget is officially adopted, he added explaining that the figures are estimates of what the board may or may not need.
“Filling out a budget is somewhat complicated because there are lots of factors that you don’t always know,” Kuhn said, later adding that “it all comes together.”
Until the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance approves the school’s budget, the figures provided for each of the funds are estimated, or are considered a “proposed budget,” Kuhn stressed Tuesday.
“Form 1 is one of the areas that we work on, which basically is budget estimates,” he said. “So these are estimated dollars of what we think we would need to potentially spend for that fund. It’s been the administration’s, the board’s role to over estimate some of those funds for a couple different reasons.
“One is to make sure that we’re maximizing the amount of monies that we need in some of those funds and it’s also to protect us because the amounts that we get from our funds are determined by our assessed values and we don’t know what our assessed values are going to be (when we adopt a budget).”
School boards across the state “over estimate” budgets as just-in-case measures, he continued.
“If our assessed value comes back, let’s say, low, it could cause us to not get enough money that we need to actually operate that fund,” Kuhn explained. “So that’s why school corporations over estimate these numbers and then you see them have to reduce those appropriations at the end of the year or the beginning of the (new) year when they get those budget orders back.”
Last year, the board proposed a $24,875,556 budget that the state department later cut by $2.4 million in February 2017.
The board will continue its budget discussion on other accounts including the Capital Projects Fund and General Fund at its July 25 meeting.