The Knox School Board has adopted its budget for 2017, and Superintendent A.J. Gappa says it looks quite similar to the previous year’s document.
School board members held a public hearing on the budget at their previous meeting, but adopted the document on Monday night. Now the budget will be sent to the state for further review.
Gappa says they anticipate the Department of Local Government Finance to make cuts to the budget.
“The DLGF will oversee it and make their cuts as they normally do and then they’ll send us back the notice and tell us what it is,” says Gappa.
Funds that don’t have local taxes applied to fund them such as transportation and capital projects are often recommended for very few or no changes.
Gappa says the Knox School Corporation’s General Fund is in better shape this year than it has been in previous years due to an increase in student population. That has afforded Knox schools to give some of its teachers an increase in salary.
Mainly, the state will focus its attention on capital projects and transportation expenditures. Gappa says another area of focus is pension servicing funds which require tax neutrality.
“Whatever we pay into the pension debt fund, you can’t take and put it onto debt service, you have to take it away from one of your other funds,” says Gappa.
That means transportation or, like Knox is doing, capital projects. That, Gappa says, presents challenges for making repairs and upgrading buildings.
