School Board Set to Pass Budget with $400,000 Surplus

One year after the Mehlville School District from their , the school board is scheduled to approve the 2012-2013 fiscal year budget with an estimated $489,000 surplus.

The board, which meets Thursday at 7 p.m. at , is expected to end the 2012-2013 fiscal year with a reserve balance of 21.21 percent, according to projections provided by Chief Financial Officer Noel Knobloch.

The budget Knobloch will present Thursday provides funding for the , and the second phase of the .

Total revenue tallied $101,851,000 with $101,362,000 in expenses, a $489,000 surplus. 

The final results of 2011-2012 are better than original projections in May. The district will end the year with a projected $2.1 million surplus and a reserve balance of 23.19 percent, a little more than 2.5 months of operating expenses.

"Having a reserve of 2.5 months is not a significantly rosy picture, it's very comfortable but it doesn't mean that we have excess money," Knobloch said at the May 10 board meeting.

The slight dip in reserves is due to the implementation of the facilities improvement plan, at and .

"That was all anticipated,” Knobloch said. “We built up almost $18 million and 21 percent (in reserves according to May projections). We know that this is going to make it go down. We have time to react if things turn bad, and we can stop things if we have to… so dipping into the reserves for that one year is not something that we hadn't planned to do."

The reserve projection is also well above the state minimum 3 percent balance and the 13 percent balance the board and Superintendent Eric Knost said they were comfortable staying above. The reserve balance 10 years ago was 6.6 percent.

Knobloch said the biggest question in district finances is state funding. In the budget summary, Knobloch said the district received a higher percentage of funding from the state than expected, resulting in an additional $250,000 for this year. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will decide a system for allocating money from the state for next year, but the CFO predicts less funding than the current year. 

Paperless Board Meetings

Spearheaded by board member Ron Fedorchak, Mike Fitzgerald from BoardDocs is scheduled to give a presentation on the school board going paperless. BoardDocs is a company that uses a cloud-based approach to eliminate board packets.

“I’ve been on the board for 8 months, and the amount of paper—it’s ridiculous,” Fedorchak said in March.

At a Missouri School Boards’ Association conference, Fedorchak discovered that a few boards started using leftover laptops for meetings. If an agenda had a mistake, rather than reprinting the board book, members could change it immediately, he said.