The school district is moving forward with its proposed budget of $173,433,100.00 for the 2012-13 school year as the school board will hold a Special Meeting tomorrow Wednesday to adopt the proposed budget by district's interim superintendent, Mrs. Belin-Pyles.
The agenda describes next school year's budget of $173,433,100.00 as follows:
From the General Fund: $145,567,709.00
General Fund monies are usually directed to, well, general purposes, hence its name. The general fund is the largest of all funds as current instructional expenditures are made from this fund, this includes teacher and administrator salaries, supplies, etc. Revenues to this fund come from different sources including local district revenues such as the local property school taxes (or local school tax levy), the lease of the old Lincoln school and the rental of schools on weekends. Also to note is that this year teachers and staff will start contributing to their health plan and such amount is seeing as a revenue. These revenues are just to name the ones I know of.
Adding to the General Fund is the Special Revenues Fund. For the 2012-13 the Special Revenues Fund is $25,495,086.00
The Special Revenues Fund is comprised of dedicated funds from either state or federal funds (any dedicated, or categorical, revenue usually ends up on this fund). Preschool funding (a Court-mandated state-funded allocation that is one of the results of the Abbott's long legal battle) is one that lands on the Special Revenues Fund as the allocated funding for preschool children and which receives full funding from the state, can only be spent on preschool expenditures. This year preschool monies are expected to be around $20 million plus. One other revenue that lands into the Special Revenue fund are federal monies, this amount never seems to amount to more that few million dollars.
Last, but not least, is the Debt Service Fund. This year this one is calling for $2,370,305.00.
This fund is set for long-term debts, the district has a total debt of a bit more than $30 million dollars that was acquired, if I am not mistaken, to build Washington School (I wasn't living here at the time of this project but I have been told that this is what the district's debt is mostly based on).
In total, these three funds, General, Special Services and Debt Service, amount to a total of $173,433,100.00. If the school board adopts this preliminary school budget then the next step is to have the preliminary 2012-13 school district budget review and accepted by the Executive County Superintendent's Office.
There are more funds within the budget but these three are are the main ones, they are also the ones that seem to set the annual school district budget. At future posts I'll try to write more in depth about each fund. It would be great if more people would take interest into the district's budget and help set an easier way to set a more transparent and accountable system that could be easily grasped by Plainfield's very diverse community. If you are interested in helping out at any level with this project please feel free to contact me at pellum9@aol.com.
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