“Last year was a good year,” Snowflake Unified School District Business Manager Mark Ollerton noted as he presented the annual financial report to the governing board Oct. 9.
Ollerton extrapolated from data he put together in the 2014 financial report and gave some of the highlights to the board.
Ollerton said that last year the primary tax rate went down to $4.8242 per $100 of assessed valuation, but the secondary tax rate when up to 95.65 cents due to the drop in assessed valuation. He predicted that it will continue to climb.
Revenues were $18,047,305, up from the previous year’s $17,536,097, but expenditures increased from $17,399,248 in 2013 to $18,069,260 in 2014. Ollerton said that the improvements on the parking lot and the purchase of computers for each teacher’s desk raised expenditures.
“We carried over the maximum amount of carryover we could,” said Ollerton.
The area of revenue the district saw the biggest increase in was from the state, which went to $9,485,500 from $8,794,590 in 2013.
Ollerton said that the Proposition 301 money, which is completely dedicated to the teaching staff, provided 53 percent of the revenue, but that has gone down from a few years ago when it made up 77 percent of the revenue from the state.
The Maintenance and Operations fund’s beginning balance July 1, 2013, was $12,384 and the ending balance on June 30, 2014, was $10,762. Ollerton said the increased money came from the utility budget that saved an additional $97,793 due to the energy lease equipment that was installed. Interest was not to be charged on the loan, “but sequestration came,” said Ollerton. He noted that the federal government paid $95,000 and much of the rest of the interest came from net proceeds from Arizona Public Service Co., which made it so the district paid very little on interest.
Ollerton said that 58 percent of the Prop. 301 dollars went into the classroom and 9.7 percent went to administrative staff.
The state completely wiped out the soft capital funds, which at one time gave $500,000 to the district for use in the classrooms. The state also stopped issuing the building renewal funds. Ollerton noted that the money the district had in this fund had to be used by the end of the 2013-14 fiscal year, so they used it to put a roof over the Special Ed building at Snowflake Junior High School.
Ollerton reported that 67.23 percent of revenues go to regular education in the classroom, 12.82 percent to special education, and the remaining goes to English Language Learners, transportation, food service and athletics.
District officials were advised that they were keeping too much money in the beginning cash balance food service funds, so the district purchased new ovens for each school. There were 189,516,000 meals served, approximately 10,000 less than the previous year, reported Ollerton.
“We are trying to be pretty aggressive with our budget,” he concluded.
