One of the major items on the agenda at the Oct 12th school board meeting was a public hearing on the budget. The powerpoint presentation can be found here. The school board is required by the state to publish a public notice for all budget measures. Historically this has been done via newspapers, but with the general decline in newspaper subscribers and the rise of online media, these notices are now distributed via a state-run service called Indiana Gateway. These public notices are required to be published ten days prior to the public hearing. The notice for this recent budget can be found here.
When reviewing the budget there are line items for General Fund and Capital Projects Fund and it can be hard to understand why the overall budget needs to be split into these different segments and what they mean. This document from the state details what each fund means and the origin in most cases when it was established. In addition to describing the funds used in a school budget, the Finance Digest document also includes some other background information into the budget process.
During the public hearing there were some concerns raised by audience members that related to the growth of district and how that impacts the budget. The short answer is that for the next several years the district will continue to grow, but the rate of growth is not nearly as rapid as the previous 20 years.
Dr. Bourff mentioned that there were concerns with the level of transparency regarding the budget. He took the time to demonstrate that links to the budget data are located on the main corporation website home page. It was encouraging to hear that the district acknowledged that it should make more of an effort to communicate with the public, and published the information on the website. The estimated 2017 budget can be viewed here.
Although I appreciate and support the effort the school board has made to increase transparency, I feel like a big opportunity was missed by not providing more details about the public hearing and the budget in the meeting agenda in Board Docs. Adding the information there would have been a fairly minor change versus adding a new section to the corporation website. It also would have been informative to point out on the main website that the budget meeting included a public hearing. I do hope that next year publishing the information to the district website continues.
The school board vote for the budget is happening at the upcoming board meeting this Wednesday. In addition to the budget vote there will also be a public hearing on additional appropriations at the October 26th school board meeting.