001Hello everybody, my name is Matt Clark. I serve as the director of business and finance for the Sun Prairie Area School District. I'm here tonight to talk through the adoption of the 25-26 budget. And really conversations around this 25-26 budget start in December of 2024. So we've been planning around this budget following our 25-26 strategic based budget and staffing planning calendar which is linked in the situation report below. What made this year's process more challenging is that it was also a state by annual budget year. So every two years the state approves a biennial budget and school districts across the state wait to hear what those final budget assumptions are so that they can budget. So again throughout the summer and into the fall we presented the preliminary budget in July following the passage of
002the state budget and then the proposed budget in August which was approved by the school board and then that proposed budget was again presented at the annual meeting on October 6th. All of that work and all of those presentations are before we know our final numbers for important things like state aid and equalized value and pupil count. So we received those final numbers on October 15th and since then we've been finalizing this proposed budget for the board. Hopefully approval tonight. And first I just want to highlight briefly the revenue limit worksheet. So I'm going to share that on the screen here. And this revenue limit worksheet um I'm not going to go through every single line, but this is a very important um document [clears throat] to at least have some understanding of as it
003gives school districts across the state a lot of their final budgeting information each year. So again every October 15th we find out a lot of these numbers and we don't know them prior to them. So one of the key pieces of information that we find out is the third Friday FTE and summer school FTE which you can find here in that the box kind of in the middle of your screen with those yellow numbers. So from 2024 to 2025 you can see that we've increased in the summer school FTE by about eight FTE. That is then taken for we only receive 40% of that so an increase of three. But then the summer school or the September FTE is our third Friday pupil count which we hold each year. As you can see that number
004went down a little over 50 FTE which is more than we had initially projected and budgeted for. Um The new independent charter schools are also listed. We we really don't have much of an idea of what that will be until the 15th. So that did go up a little bit which then feeds into the total FTE. Um And one thing to note with the revenue limit formula is that it doesn't take your total FTE each year. It takes the three year average of your total FTE. So that green cell of 8,372 is the three year rolling average of the FTE. So even though we are decreasing in our total FTE from 2024 to 2025 the year 2022 was the lowest of the three years. So even though 2025 is lower than last year our three
005year average is still increasing. So the revenue limit formula essentially takes that 8372 that you can see in that green cell in the upper right hand corner in row three is the revenue per member. So that's 17,044.31 is what we receive per FTE. That number then increased in row four in the biennial budget by 325 which was part of the state budget to then give us in row five our final maximum revenue per member of 17,369.31. We take that number multiplied by the 8,372 which is that three year rolling average and that essentially provides us with our revenue limit. So if you remember our revenue limit subtracted by state aid then equals our tax levy. There's a lot of exemptions that I won't go through in those yellow slides but really the key cell to
006know is that in row 12A is our October 15th certification of general aid. What that essentially means is it's our final state aid number. And that number came in at 61,521,076 which is a slight increase from the prior year but a lot lower than we had anticipated and I'll go through that in a second. So looking big picture taking that revenue limit total amount which was our per member multiplied by that three year average subtracting that October 15th state aid amount then is our levy. So our general levy is in row 13 that 83 million 421 135 we bring in our other levies for our debt service, community service as well as some charge backs we get our total school based tax levy of 93 million 906 896 in row 16. Another piece of information
007I just want to note on the revenue limit worksheet is also in row 16 a little bit to the left in that yellow cell is our equalized value. So let me bring that over a little bit. The fall 2025 property values we had budgeted at a 6% increase in those property values. This number came in October 15th at about 9.2 billion dollars of property value which is an increase of 7.88% from the prior year. And why that's important is because that number then feeds into our levy rate or mill rate which came in at $10.21 which is lower than we had presented at the annual meeting due to those property values. So I'm going to go back to the situation report just to finish up, but essentially the revenue limit worksheet is provides us with
008all of our final budgeting information that we need to know to then be able to come to you with final numbers in late October each year. So as part of all of the information that we find out on October 15th these are the major adjustments that we've made to the proposed budget since the annual meeting. So I'll just go through these briefly, but these are the big ticket items. So on the revenue limit worksheet I pointed out that third Friday in September FTE versus summer school. So we had budgeted a decrease of eight FTE for our third Friday which actually ended up being a decrease of 53 FTE. So adjusting that within our budget as well as the open enrollment in and out amounts. So if you remember back to some of my presentations we
009receive money when students open enroll into our district and we pay an expense when they open enroll out of our district. So we budget a best guess until the third Friday in September. So as you can see in bullet points number two and in number five that's us adjusting for the actual revenue and expense after the third Friday. Point number three the equalized aid decrease of 800,000 less than what was presented at the annual meeting largely due to two things. One was the fact that within the state budget no increase was provided to the state aid funding pool as well as we had some larger districts delay submission on some of their financials not necessarily on purpose but it does throw off our calculations and estimates that we receive from DPI in July and August.
010So that was something that we had to account for in this final budget that's being presented. Going back to the revenue limit formula the revenue limit authority subtracted from that state aid number then gives us our levy. So because state aid came in 800,000 dollars less than we had anticipated that number then has to be passed on to our tax levy. onto our taxpayers. So they 861,000 tax levy increase again largely due to the decrease in state aid as well as independent charter schools and private school vouchers which we also have to levy for. So after incorporating these big ticket items, these major adjustments as well as some other adjustments that we make each year this budget does continue to be balanced which is a highlight that we want to make sure we communicate. We'll
011continue to update the budget quarterly throughout the fiscal year so you'll be able to see those like I said quarterly we'll be presenting that to the board of any updated grants or donations that we get that we revise the budget for. Um the entire Sun Prairie Area School District budget, um inclusive of all funds, is $221 million. So, um that is all outlined in our attachment one, which is the budget adoption documents, which I'll show real quickly. Um this is the state um required document that has to be approved. Um this essentially gives us our audited financials from 23-24, our unaudited financials from 24-25, which will become audited this winter, and then the 25-26 budget that um is before you tonight. Um this is sorted by fund, as well as um function as you get
012lower to give you a little bit more information on um where our budget lies um within these account codes. There's a lot of information on here, as well as a a lot of information that I've presented um tonight. So, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at any point with any questions that you have. Um but thank you so much for your time. Um and again, reach out if you need anything. Thank you. >> [music]