001Welcome USD264 patrons, community members, staff, parents, uh, and anyone joining us on YouTube for our next update. Uh, this is volume 24 of our Clearwater Clarity and our superintendent update. So, we're happy uh to join you. Uh, hopefully we're kind of moving through some of this winter weather. Got through our first snow day. Uh, and now we're ready to kind of uh attack the rest of the year and and get on to our 2627 school year. So part of the process that happens for superintendent and district office is that around this point in time uh we start getting a better understanding what of our general fund what our funding is going to be for the year. We don't know that in July when we build our budget. So last month we really talked about property
002taxes and how we kind of build our budgets and some of those pieces but all of that is a guessing game because we don't know what our student count is going to be. We don't know what the waitings are such as free lunch, CTE minutes, uh ESL minutes. Some of those things we don't know until after we have our September 20th count and then we get audited and then that is the ability for us to understand that what our general funding uh what our general fund is going to be and what our supplemental general fund is going to be that allows us to start predicting then what our spending is going to be allowed for this year. So we step into each year uh July through September, midepptember, maybe even early October guessing what our
003budget's going to be. Now, I'm not saying we're guessing in a wide range. We're we're within, you know, a h 100,000 on a $10 million budget, you know, within 1% of where we're we're going to be. So, it's not a large discrepancy. Uh but we're we're not for sure and we still aren't 100% sure what our budget's going to be until after the final audit uh is done. And usually we don't get that information until midFebruary, sometimes March um to be able to understand how much we're legally able to spend um throughout the year. So funding for schools is not what you think in a private business where you just bring in revenue, you track expenses, you determine the difference before. We set a budget based on an art of how many students we think
004we're going to have. Then we start uh gauging our spending and and protecting our spending uh during those early months. And then as the money starts coming in from the state through your property taxes, then we're able to be diligent in ensuring that we're spending that cash on the appropriate things in our budget. So we're going to talk a little bit again like we always do about our why. And so our general fund is the largest amount of money from state to the schools. So as we talked about last month, we take 20 mills of your or the first 20 mill of your property tax and that money gets sent to the state. That has nothing to do with the local uh Clearwater School District. That goes directly to the state. All of that from
005the entire state of Kansas goes into the state general fund and then from there the uh state allocates money based on our enrollment. So we have a headcount enrollment and then we have a weighted enrollment. So I'm going to talk just briefly about both of those. A headcount enrollment is the actual amount of students. So one student that is attending on September 20th or if they attend a day before or a day after that is a 1.0 FTE. So that is a full-time equivalency is what FTE stands for. So for every student that is in the building on September 20th, we get to count towards our funding. So this past year we had 1,38 students um not not including prek, but kindergarten through 12th grade that were attending school on September 20th. After that, each
006one of their waitings, like a free reduced lunch application, if a student is on free lunch or reduced app, they get an extra waiting. Students that are in CTE classes, they get extra waiting. Students that are in transportation, they get extra waiting. We also get extra waiting because we're considered a low enrollment district. So, our weighted enrollment is 1550. That amount is then taken times the base amount which is $5,615 which gives us our general fund budget of 10,100 and some odd thousand. So I'll just round it to 10.1 million. So that is how we get our general fund is based on that enrollment and the waiting the enrollment and our waitings times the base amount that is set by the state which this year was $5,615 in our general fund. Over 80% of that
007is spent on salaries for staff. And that's not just teachers, that's not just administrators. That is every single person that works within our district, a custodian, a bus driver, um maintenance staff, secretarial staff, um coaches, all of those things are paid out of our general fund. So over 80% of our general fund, that 10.1 million goes towards um payroll. and we have a little over or right at a million dollars per month uh of payroll during the months that we are in school. So it does eat up most of our cash. We have very little cash to do other things with. So here is um a little bit of that opportunity to look at this in a hard number. Uh so our base state aid is that 5615 per FTE as we described earlier is
008the student plus the student waitings and there are some of the waitings that are listed there. So you can see within that table is that currently in fiscal year 26, which is the 2526 school year, that's the one that we are in. If we have an FTE of 1550, which we do, that's our audited amount times the base, that gives us a general fund of uh 8,73,250. The 10.1 I was referencing including special ed funding that we have to send to Goddard. So this is money that is kept locally here. The 8.7 million that we get to use and over 80% of that is uh spent on uh salary. If we start projecting towards fiscal year 27, we are looking at potentially because we are in a declining enrollment that we may only have 1540
009uh FTE. And the way that that's calculated is we get to use the current year's headcount enrollment or the previous year which one is higher. So, we know because we are losing students each year that when we get to September 20th of 2026, we're going to be able to use the September 20th, 2025 student headcount for our budget. So, we can be more accurate in our budget knowing that we're in declining enrollment that we can use that number of 1540. And that's assuming that our um waitings are going to stay very much similarly the same. So when we do this is again like we talked about on September 20th. We do that count. We submit that to the state and what's called the SO66. That's a report that we send to the state. They are
010able to then start auditing. What they do within their audit is that we have to upload files from our student information system power school to the state. They then start looking at that and making sure what we submitted in our budget and within our SO66 matches what's said in this in the P school system based on which class the students are taking, what grade they're in, what age they are, how far do they live away from their attendance center. And so then we get a opportunity to meet with a KSDE rep who's an auditor who comes down. They spend two days here within our district looking through all of our files. And at that point in time, they may take away a few things. Maybe we said someone lived more than 2 and a half
011miles away based on an address we had and when they actually run the address it's 2.2 mi. So we would lose some transportation uh funding for that. So we go through that process. We just completed our and got our final report from KSD um just last week and we only lost 0.9 FTE which that is a good thing. In almost all districts that you're at, you usually lose between four and 10 FTE based on, you know, some data not being calculated, right? So, very much kudos to our technology department, to our business, uh, management, office management, uh, department for their work in this. And then in June, uh, usually around June 15th, we get our final legal max. And that is letting us know the total amount that we are required to spend. Again, we're
012not like a private uh company that gets the opportunity to just say, "Oh, we're going to save this money for next year." We are legally required to spend all of our general fund money on expenses that are approved through the general fund or through transfers that are approved to the general fund. Transfers are thing like food service. we can transfer some money out of general fund to food service department to help pay for the beginning of the year uh supplies and food that they're going to need to purchase before we start getting revenue in uh from the state. So, what I wanted to do in all of this is to really get you an understanding about how headcount and our student number data really drives our budget. And so, the more students we have, the
013more money uh we have to work with and to be able to pay our expenses. What we're starting to see is that there's a bubble within our enrollment data for USD264. And as you can see here, comparatively speaking, from 2022 in the fall to the spring of 2026, we are in a declining. And what you see is that you see our total numbers going from 11:09 to 1091 do not look um like we've lost a lot of students, but we are in a downward trend. What I want to bring to your attention is the highlighted four grades which is kindergarten through third grade where we have numbers of students at 68 52 59 and 67. These were according to our September 20th dates. Then you look starting at fourth grade it's 89 76 and on
014on up to all the way to 102 at the freshman level and at the senior level. So, we really have this gap starting at fourth grade and going into third grade where our numbers are dropping. And those numbers are dropping across the state. There's less there's over 7,000 less students in in uh public schools across the state of Kansas. And that's due to the lower birth rate that we're seeing across the nation. So, this is not any data that we're not unaware of. uh it's just the opportunity for us to start looking at our declining enrollment is our trend is that we are reducing from four sections of a grade to three sections in our elementary schools. So what I mean by that is there are four teachers in fourth grade that each split up
015the 90 students. Next year there's only going to be 67 students and so at that point in time we're only going to need three uh fourth grade classrooms. And so we've been able to over the past three years been able to reduce our sections through attrition, meaning people retire or uh leave our district for other jobs. And so we're able to reduce that. Again, that's the same process we're hoping to be able to go through for this year. But as these smaller classes keep creeping up, we're going to have less and less amount of u staff that are needed to be able to educate them because 80% of our budget is made up of salaries. And so we are looking at multiple different ways. We've done a change in our energy where we've saved some
016money within our energy. Uh we've changed some insurance practices to help uh save some uh money that way. A lot of our outsourcing contracts, we're looking at if we can do them inhouse to be able to save us uh some money on our expenses, but that is again only about 20% of our budget. Most of our budget comes from our staff. So over the course of the next uh four to five years, we're going to continue to try to reduce staff where we can u based on the numbers that we have. Not out of just um losing staff, but reduce our staff where we need to based on those numbers. So I just want to make sure the community is aware of where our current budget is, how we achieve our money, and how we
017are looking at our in um declining enrollment, how it's going to look going forward. So again, as everything, we appreciate everyone that jumps in the arena with us and supports us. Uh, and then lastly, if you have any questions or want to sit down and have more of a one-on-one discussion, please do so. Also, I want to put a plug in here at the end on February 16th, we will have a community meetings about the past, the present, and the future, the funding of USD264. Uh, we'll have a session at 7:00 in the morning, at 11:30 in the afternoon, and then at 7 o'clock at night. So, depending on your work schedule that day, you may be able to come uh to any one of those sessions. So, we look forward to joining us and
018look at social media for more information about that. Thank you.