News
Trimble Schools Budget Uncertain Until State Budget Money Comes In
By: Sarah Guinn | Athens Messenger
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Although Trimble Local School’s five-year forecast of operating funds, released by Treasurer Jared Bunting, shows the district losing money over the next five fiscal years, it remains offset by a positive cash balance.
“It’s not bad at all,” Bunting said, but those figures do not take the proposed state budget into account, he added.
Gov. John Kasich’s proposed state budget, which is currently being debated in the Senate, isn’t expected to be finalized until June 30.
What the House submitted and what the Senate wants would result in two very different funding formulas, Bunting said, and there is no middle ground between them.
With the way Kasich proposed the funding formula, the House would return to using the charge-off, which would judge a district based on its perceived wealth, and if that were to happen, the district would potentially lose $80,000 of its funding from the state, Bunting explained.
But if the budget were to sway the other way, the district could come out ahead with nearly more than $500,000, Bunting said, therefore, with such a swing between what could happen, Trimble Local’s projected values do not consider state funding figures.
“This budget could look extremely different in October,” he said.
Not included in the forecast are savings from the elimination of the middle school principal position.
The forecast is in line with last year’s projected look where revenues were expected to outpace expenditures through at least 2017. Trimble’s projected cash balance was expected to be around $4 million at the end of 2019 compared with just over $2 million in 2012.