The School Board received a report regarding its end of the year finances during its most recent meeting.
“At this time, these financial statements were audited Aug. 5 through Aug. 8,” Business Administrator, Amity Small, wrote in a memo to the Board. “The field audit took four days with the final report coming to the Board in the December/January timeframe.”
For the general fund, which consists of property taxes, state and local revenue, they expect it to come in at $295,796 above expectation.
“The major factors for this are Special Education Aid [Catastrophic Aid] accounting for $177,006 of the overage, Interest earned accounting for $170,991, and $34,822 in Other State Aid,” Small said. “These overages helped offset the $133,000 shortfall of projected Medicaid revenue.”
In terms of expenses, Small noted it will be $926,000 below the approved budget.
“Savings from staff turnover with related savings in benefit accounts are the major factors for this positive budget to actual position,” Small said. “We also had unfilled positions that resulted in a positive variance in salary accounts. We did have some accounts with negative variances, which are detailed later in this report.”
Small explained that a lot of their savings will come from retirements, and hiring employees generally for lower salaries at first.
“This year, the School District’s financials will show a large savings in professional salaries due to the number of retirements effective June 2023,” Small said.
In total, for full-time salaries, they are expected to save about $1.45 million compared to the original budget.
“This includes a professional staff savings of $639,000, support savings of $651,000, and custodial savings of $161,000,” Small wrote in a memo. “Unfilled positions along with new or incoming employees, who are very often hired at a lower rate than the employees who retired, account for this large variance.”
It was also noted that the District “did have some unfilled special education support staff positions this year.”
“This is reflected with $709,566 budget variance on the salary line,” Small said. “We did, however, contract those services out, and there is a budget overrun in the contracted services line of $750,090. The number of open positions has decreased from last year, thanks in part to a new support staff contract, and we are optimistic that there will be even fewer open positions next year.”
Another major savings that they had this year was for employee benefits about $630,000 less than the budget amount.
“Some of this is driven by indirect savings from the salary accounts mentioned above, [taxes, retirement],” Small wrote in a memo. “Health and dental premiums came in $382,222 below budget. The account line “other retirement salary” [500238] captures the cost of retirements at year-end. This line is contractual and is based on calculated costs of those individuals who have retired in FY24 and shows a negative budget of $274,959. FY24 has sixteen teacher/admin retirements and thirteen support/custodial retirements versus ten teachers/admin from last year.”
One area that was over budget was for out-of-district tuition cost which Small said was over-budget by $281,237 “due to more students going out-of-district than was budgeted due to unplanned move-ins, court ordered placements, and Charter schools.”
“Unplanned tuition increases also account for the variance. Special Education transportation also is over budget by $116,456 due to additional out-of-district runs and an unplanned homeless placement,” Small wrote in a memo. “Vocational tuition is also over budget by $99,263 due to increased student participation in CTE programs, increased tuition, and less reimbursement from the State of NH.”