School board approves budget for 2021-22

The Hot Springs County School District Board of Trustees unanimously approved the district’s proposed budget for 2021 to 2022 on July 15, after Chauncy Johnson, business manager for the district summed up the past year as “a challenge like none of us has ever really seen.”

Johnson pointed out the number of school districts across the country that were not able to provide the same services to their students as the Hot Springs County School District.

He credited the district’s staff for this feat, before crediting the board with already approving the district’s new salary schedules for fiscal year 2022, as “a progressive way of helping, especially,” its younger and newer staff members, both classified and certified, “get into a situation where they’re making better money sooner.”

Comparing salaries and benefits on a year-to-year basis, Johnson reported the district’s salary expenditures for fiscal year 2021 were $6.15 million, and have since decreased to $5.932 million for this year, which he explained was due to using more SR funds for the daycare, so that the district “can keep our teachers in front of our students.”

Johnson also noted the district is currently down in bus drivers, “and I don’t believe we’ve fully hired all the positions that we need,” even as it’s invested in more affordable health benefits for its staff.“We will still be going out to bid this year on health insurance benefits, to see what we might be able to get out in the market, to ensure that the product that we have is competitive, or to find something better if it’s out there,” Johnson said.

The district’s three-year rolling ADM average sits at 642.957 students, which Johnson acknowledged is down 8.566 from last year.

“This number is a decimal because it’s based on (the) days available for a student to be in class that’s enrolled in our district, against the days that they actually attend,” Johnson said. “That’s what our revenues will be based on.”

Johnson expressed his belief that the district has “about the same number of students” attending this year as last, while citing efforts by parents and school staff alike to ensure students weren’t attending classes with any illnesses.

“We were forced to keep kids home, under quarantine,” Johnson said. “We actually have a very similar number of students enrolled, if not maybe a few more, but because of their attendance, that number is down.”

As such, Johnson speculated that the district’s true enrollment is “closer to 651, or somewhere between 650 and 660,” and he even anticipated there might be “some forgiveness” of such numbers, due to the extenuating circumstances he identified, but until he could confirm those suspicions, he simply preferred to keep his own revenue estimates low..“In the middle of August, I’ll have a much more solid idea of what our actual revenues will be,” Johnson said.

The Hot Springs County School District has continued COVID-related funding from the federal government, in the amount of “a little over $1.4 million,” according to Johnson, who added that the majority of this funding will be used for student support related to learning loss, with other portion going toward district daycare support, additional equipment, furniture for social distancing, PPE as needed, sanitary supplies, custodial staffing and paperless workflow.

“The interesting situation that (our district) finds itself in is that we made all our efforts to get back to school as soon as we could, and of the districts across the country, probably less than 50% were in person,” Johnson said.

“The federal government is continuing to push money out to get those schools open, (but) we sort of adapted already, so as we have SR2 funds and the like, we’ll be pushing those into learning loss.”

The county’s prediction for the district’s assessed valuation is $122,596,000, which Johnson described as “up slightly from the year we just ended,” leading him to forecast that the district can “expect about $4.1 million from the county side of our revenue.”Johnson asked the board to approve a total budget of $12,532,977.08, with $11,945,000 in planned expenditures.