Dear Faculty,
Parents and Community Members,
The purpose of
this letter is to keep you informed regarding our current operating budget, our
efforts to develop a plan to address our deteriorating facilities, activities
we are engaging in both locally and at the state level to impact our financial
situation and our general plans and approach to managing these going forward.
VISION
& MISSION
Moffat County
School District has adopted a mission and vision that we use as the basis for
all decisions we make; from developing a curriculum, to budgeting, to
transportation.
¯ Mission - All students will achieve at
high levels, in a safe, quality learning environment
¯ Vision - We will become a collaborative
team committed to achieving high levels of student and staff learning, focusing
on targets and results.
As you read the
information below, remember that this is the basis for the decisions we have or
will make in future.
Budgeting for a school
district is a 6-month process that we are entering the final phase of right
now. We begin the process in
December by developing a set of assumptions that will drive our revenue and
expenditure forecasts. We then
develop a preliminary forecast under those assumptions while always keeping our
core values and mission in mind.
This may appear easy, but developing an accurate forecast is sometimes
as difficult as forecasting the weather.
It is very difficult to predict the price of fuel and utilities, the
cost of health insurance, the amount of federal funds, which are contingent on
what Congress does, our very volatile mineral revenue and variable specific
ownership taxes. Add to that a
constantly changing enrollment and you have a pretty complex picture.
Just before Christmas last
year we were forecasting quite a difficult financial picture for the school
district in the near term. In the
2007-2008 budget we had predicted to spend a significantly greater amount of
money than we thought we would be taking in, obviously not an acceptable
situation.
Knowing we were entering a
time of financial uncertainty and pending crisis we knew we had to act to
change the revenue and expenditure variables we had control over to prevent
this potential crisis from becoming a reality. With our core values and mission in mind we embarked on a
plan to avert a financial crisis in Moffat County schools. That plan included
the following key points:
¯ Be as transparent as possible, giving the staff and
community financial facts regarding our current revenue and expenditures as
well as our best forecast at any point in time along the way.
¯ Develop an action plan to change the school finance
law, to increase our share of state funding to impact our status as the lowest
per pupil funded school district in the State of Colorado.
¯ Reduce our expenditures to a level that we could
sustain without continued deficit spending while not sacrificing our core
values and mission.
¯ If we exhaust finding additional revenue sources and
cut our expenditures to a level that risked our core values and mission, ask
our community to support our schools through an increase in the mill levy in
order to maintain the quality of education.
Using more
current information than we had in December, we are projecting that Moffat
County School District will receive an increase in revenue from previous
years. This increase can be mainly
attributed to three factors:
Significant reductions in
forecasted expenditures have been made including:
¯ Reducing the number of employees or length or
contracts through attrition. This
includes administrator contracts, teachers, aides, and custodians
¯ Cutting our operation & supply budgets 10% or
more in every school and department
¯ Reducing our extracurricular expenditures without
eliminating programs
¯ Limiting capital expenditures to absolute necessities
During the past few years we
have been spending down our fund balance (our savings account) at a rate of
approximately $500,000 per year. Our preliminary forecast in December showed
that we would have to spend $1,000,000 of savings to maintain the current level
of our educational program. This
is double the amount of savings spent in previous years and reduces our savings
to low levels that are unacceptable.
As we refined our revenue
projections we felt it appropriate to include increases in volatile revenue
sources such as minerals and specific ownership taxes due to the continued
strong economic activity in the county.
As a result, we are now forecasting to spend down our fund balance
approximately $400,000 instead of the budgeted $1 million. While still not
acceptable, this is a substantial improvement!
We had previously been
considering a recommendation to ask the community to support a mill levy
override, but the above changes have allowed us to go another year without
asking for this support. We will
continue our efforts to increase other revenue sources and reduce expenditures
where appropriate and in line with our core vision and mission.
Fortunately, our effort to
increase revenue has given us an opportunity to add back some of the previously
eliminated expenditures. Our staff
and community input regarding budget cuts helped us define what was closest to
our core vision and mission. Top
priorities were:
¯ Attracting and retaining highly qualified staff by
maintaining competitive salary and benefits
¯ Maintaining low class sizes and aide support
¯ Supporting core curriculum and interventions
With our commitment to our
core vision and mission in mind, we are now reinstating some previously
eliminated expenditures:
¯ Reinstate teachers at the primary level to maintain
class sizes between 18-22
¯ Give our teachers a salary increase equal to cost of
living increase of 3.35%
¯ Continue with teacher leaders which builds a strong
foundation for instruction and coordinating our intervention efforts
Of course we will continue
to monitor our financial situation on an on-going basis and make adjustments as
necessary.
Moffat County
SchoolÕs aging facilities are a major concern. To address these facility needs, the Board of Education has
tentatively decided to move forward with a bond issue to renovate our school
buildings and build a new middle school, grades 6-8. The initial plan calls for
reconfiguring the schools by converting CIS into a fourth elementary
school. All four elementary
schools would house grades Pre-K through 5th. The preliminary total cost of the
project is $28 million with approximately $15 million for a new middle school.
As a next step
in gathering community input, Neenan Company in partnership with Moffat County
School District will host a series of public forums to gather input regarding the
boardÕs recommended projects. The
school board invites the public to attend these informative and interactive
design sessions.
¯ Wednesday, June 6th -
ÒConditions of SatisfactionÓ Meeting – This will be an overview of the
boardÕs initial recommendations, with an interactive community input
session. If you can only make one
meeting this is the best one to attend.
¯ Thursday, June 7th - New Middle School - ÒCollaborative
Design Work SessionÓ – This all day session is designed to solicit more
detailed input, and begin developing actual project designs.
¯ Friday, June 8th
– All other building upgrades - ÒCollaborative Design Work SessionÓ -
solicit more detailed input for our other building upgrades. A couple of examples that are currently
being considered are
o
Adding a
larger cafeteria to East Elementary,
o
Reconfiguring
CIS to accommodate Preschool and kindergarten,
o
Redesigning
each schoolÕs main entry for increased security and safety.
o
Upgrading
all heating, ventilation and lighting
The all-day ÒCollaborative Design Work SessionÓ will be
flexible and individualized, where you may drop in anytime for as long as you
would like to share your ideas, or just observe the process. The end product of
these work sessions will be a preliminary design for each schoolÕs upgrades and
a new middle school. We would love to have you attend and give us your
thoughts.
Pete Bergmann
Superintendent
Moffat County School
District