LPOSD's financial future solid
PONDERAY — In looking forward to fiscal year 2020, the Lake Pend Oreille School District has two known variables in regard to budget.
First, said Lisa Hals, the district’s chief financial and operations officer, LPOSD’s two-year, $25.4 million maintenance and operations supplemental levy request passed on March 12. The $12.7 million over the first year will represent approximately 37 percent of the district’s budget, where in previous years the levy has represented about 30 percent.
Another known factor, she said, is that state appropriations will represent about 60 percent of the 2020 budget.
The first budget set by the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee was the largest — the K-12 budget — on Feb. 19, Hals said.
It has since been signed into law by the governor. The highlights of that budget, Hals said, include the implementation of the fifth year of the career ladder with the exception of minimum salaries increasing for teachers, an increase in discretionary funding of 3.4 percent, and a doubling of K-3 literacy money.
“When we projected in September what our state appropriation, come July 1, 2019, was going to be, we projected it was going to be an increase of $1.2 million,” Hals told LPOSD trustees as she gave her financial update to the board last week.
The state funding falls short of that September projection, however, because there was no increase for teachers on the higher rungs of the career ladder as was originally recommended by the state superintendent of public instruction, she said.
“JFAC took a much more conservative approach than both our governor and the Economic Outlook and Revenue Assessment Committee on projected revenues for next year …” Hals said. “So that means, for us, a shortfall of about $175,000 over projections from September. The way that I always try to project in a very conservative manner where the growth we realized in September, I didn’t build into these projections and it offsets it, so I am not concerned.”
On the federal level, Hals said President Trump’s administration released a proposed budget for fiscal year 2020 on March 11 that recommended a 10 percent cut to the Department of Education. In looking at the past two years of similar proposals, Hals said the cuts are unlikely to happen.
“Congress sets funding levels, and has rejected those proposals the last two years,” she said.
Hals also touched on some of the legislation at the state level, including SB 1061, which would change the rules for districts seeking permanent supplemental levies. If passed, there would no longer be a permanent option, though districts with permanent overrides currently would be grandfathered. In its place, school districts that have passed a levy for a minimum of seven consecutive years would be able to place a measure on the ballot to extend the levy for three to 10 years. They would still have the option to run one- or two-year levies as well.
Another bill was pushed through last minute in regards to the public school funding formula, which started out as a 60-plus page draft, pared down through several iterations, Hals said. Now, according to the statement of purpose for the bill, it is “mostly comprised of definitions needed for a student based funding formula and some reporting of student enrollment data.” In preparation for funding formula discussions during the 2020 legislative session, school districts will report student enrollment figures in the fall of 2019, as well as average daily attendance.
“So this is the state education committee trying to say that a ton of work has been done, we want to start the definitions and we have heard very clearly from stakeholders that we need the data, the real data that would be used in this funding formula, to project out how it is going to impact the 52 charter districts and the 115 brick and mortar districts in the state,” Hals said.
Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.