The Eastern Pulaski Community School Corporation is making the final preparations for the 2019 budget year. Last week, the school board officially readopted the 2019 Operations Fund budget, after Superintendent Dan Foster said an error was found in the fund’s adopted tax levy.
“The number on here, which is the $2.5 million, that number didn’t get carried in Gateway from one form to the next,” Foster told board members. “So when it was actually adopted and printed, it had a wrong number in there because the system just didn’t kick it to the right number for whatever reason. We’re not pointing fingers. It just happened. We didn’t catch it. DLGF caught it, and we’ve talked with DLGF. They said here’s what we need to do.”
School corporations will see a major change in their funding structures January 1, when their General Funds are replaced by an Education Fund and their Bus Replacement, Transportation, and Capital Projects funds are combined into a new Operations Fund.
As part of the change, the school board passed a resolution allowing interest earned on the Operations Fund to be transferred into the Education Fund. Foster said that money could then be used to help support the salaries of teachers and other instructional staff. “It’s not like we are gaining thousands and millions of dollars a year in interest, just like probably most of you at home are not, but every little bit helps,” he said. “And the idea of this resolution is to put that over into the Education Fund for that purpose.”
The school board also gave its approval for school officials to make the necessary transfers, to balance out the budget at the end of the 2018 calendar year.
