001Hi, this is Philip Wright, director of business and finance for Sun Prairie Area School District, giving the school board and the public the first draft of the 2526 uh budget summary. So, a lot of different things we're going to go over today, a little bit longer screencast than normal, but um I won't read over all 20 items, but we'll walk our way through this. So the first thing is as of June 12th and that date is important because the state budget discussions are happening right now. Uh nothing has been decided but as of June 12th what we're building the budget on is a $325 revenue limit increase per pupil. Um there has been talk about a large increase in equalized aid. Uh but remember that just goes for property tax relief. There's also some talk
002that equalized a will not increase. So we'll definitely have to follow that. Um there's been some talk about increase in special ed uh aid reimbursement. Again, something that we'll need to really follow. Um there's been pretty minimal and actually decreases in special ed ages over the last few years again. Um and then as I said before, the state budget will have to definitely watch that and as that hopefully gets resolved here in a few days or hopefully a week, um then our district budget will need to be changed accordingly. So we spend a lot of time in the district on strategicbased budgeting. What that means is the senior leadership budgeted team which is the senior leaders and the director of finance and HR meet every month uh to discuss budget items and we develop uh
003if we're going to add things to the budget they have to go through a pretty comprehensive plan. Um you'll see those in just a minute here. We also spend a lot of time on staffing and I'll talk about staffing in a few minutes um because staffing is again 80% of our budget. And then uh we have a very detailed comprehensive budget calendar that lays out kind of step by step that's linked in here and the school board approved that calendar um I think it was back last November. And again we use a lot of data using comparison data looking at what we spend compared to other districts. Um and then we also do a budget forecast model which I took to the school board. I think that was January maybe February of where the district
004u budget will be um forecasted for the next five years. So again when the district leaders look at strategic budget items these are the 10 questions that they ask um to save some time. I won't go through all 10 but you can see uh what's what is the budget funding source? Um who's the cabinet leader on that? Can funds be used from conserve funds from prior years? So again, those are the 10 questions we ask when we're looking at strategic budget items. So a lot of what you'll see in the next few slides for um strategic budget items actually is a result of the November 5th referendum that was approved by our community. So we're using those referendum dollars to um do some strategic budget items. So they are um and these all went to
005the school board. I don't have the exact date. I think it was February, but we have given a board an update on these. So just to recap, uh DLI uh dual language immersion uh transportation from all elementary schools to the two fe two host schools. Uh we're anticipating the estimated cost of that will be $100,000. We're also expanding our dual credits for high school students um to attend Madison College STEM Academy. Um the estimated cost over the next couple years is about $400,000. There is an offset because when those students leave and go full-time to Madison College, we do not have to do staffing for them. So, there's a little bit of offset there. We also uh want to make sure we have enough shuttles between East and West High School. So, not a very
006large expense, but $12,800 again to make sure that we have access for both East and West students um able to attend different programs at both high schools. And another thing that we've done is added one FTE to both East and West High School. So, um, uh, some classes that maybe wouldn't have been offered in prior years because of low class sizes are more offered now because of those extra two staff members. So, um, that total is 160,000 for those two staff members. And again, this is all part of the referendum funding um, dollars. The last item I just want to mention is also part of the referendum was staff compensation. Um, we're holding $1 million in uh budget accounts for un uh for compensation. Those in benefits that might happen or probably will happen during
007the 25 26 year that exact amounts and uh have not been determined yet, but it could be for health insurance renewals. We'll know that in a little bit if that goes up more than 10%. Um, also I know there's a study for support staff and administrators on wages and um all those increases would come to the school board before they uh went out to the staff. But again, at this point, we're putting u a million dollars into the budget um kind of as a holding until that work gets done over the next uh 25 26 fiscal year. So just to recap again, this is all things that are coming from referendum funds. Um, you just heard me talk about uh the four things kind of from the TLE side for 672,000 and then the million
008dollars um in compensation. So, kind of going back to school finance uh 101, how districts are budgeted for, uh we have a revenue limit that all districts uh have to follow. It's our three-year rolling average of uh membership, which is enrollment. Um, and then we take that times uh what the increase per student is. Again, at this point, we're budgeting for $325 increase, and that's the revenue limit or the spending authority that we have uh for new programs and for staffing and for increases and things like that. So, getting specific to membership, if you hear me, what membership is is really our third Friday count. Um, but then remember like 4K students don't fully count as a full student because they only attend school 60% of the time. And then summer school is also a
009calculation. But our membership count over the last three years, you can see it has gone up and our three-year average is 8,324 as a membership number. Um, last year, just to go back, our membership increased by 165 members. uh and that's a 2% growth. Our preliminary budget is based on a decrease of eight students and that's based on the University of Wisconsin's enrollment projections which was presented to the board again back in January. Uh they're projecting or projecting a decrease of eight students. We I'll say it here. We monitor enrollments basically over the summer, every week and almost daily when we get into July and August to see where our enrollments are. If school started today, we would have a decrease of 125 students. Don't be too alarmed with that because again, we enroll a
010lot of students over the summer. So hopefully we uh gain those 125 students and get back to a balance or at least a a neutral enrollment. But again, we'll monitor that over the summer to see where that comes in at. This is just our history going back 10 years on our third Friday enrollment. Um so you can see again 16 17 18 19 we had pretty steady growth. Then during COVID we had some slight decreases and then for the last two years we have had uh increase and again our enrollment uh increase both the the last two third Friday counts. So up and down and back up. Um so we'll see where we go again for this third Friday. So equalized a big share of our budget. Um, remember that's not additional spending, but just
011helps offset the tax levy. At this point, we're budgeting for a 6.6% increase in equalized aid. That would be a $4 million increase in equalized aid. Um, again, we'll um have to update that on July 1st when we get our first estimate from the state and then on October 15th that amount gets finalized. So, as I said before, uh we're budgeting for a $325 increase to the revenue limit. Um and that if we get $325, that probably will not keep up with inflation. Um but that's again what we're anticipating the state hopefully gives us or maybe it's hopefully more than that. I do want to point out that because we do not get reimbursed on special education expenses the way we should be, in fact, it's very small compared to most districts, the district has
012to allocate $19 million of general fund dollars to cover our special ed cost above the state and federal aid. So, that's a direct transfer out of fund 10 to special education. U I put this slide in here all just to remind people that of what our class sizes are and just to remind you also that um we're anticipating all class sizes will be pretty close to this range. Sometimes they go a little bit above a little bit below but in general 99% of our classes are within this range and um and we're not ant or we're not at this point recommending in any changes to class sizes for next year. So, with that said, there is staffing changes that normally happen with our district. Uh, sometimes I'll just go through the categories. There are because
013of enrollment. Um, obviously if we have more kindergarters in the year before at a certain school, we'd have to add a kindergarten teacher. Actually, this year, most of the enrollment increase is going to be at the middle school level. Uh, referendum funded. Again, we just talked about that. Some positions were going to be referendum funded. Transfer service is students that move into our district. we get to claim the additional cost for uh multilingual students and special ed students. It's a pretty detailed process, but if we claim and receive transfer service dollars, we typically put that back into staffing. Um we do have some FTE shifting. U example of that is sometimes in and especially in people's services they might say we're going to reduce two um instructional aids or special ed aids and h and
014it's take that money and put it into a teacher or vice versa it happens too. So that's what we mean by FT shifting or reclassification with dual language immersion. Um we're adding second grade at North Side and Meadow View. So that is dual language immersion is kind of usually means we have to add more staff at those grades. It just how numbers play out. Not always but generally we have to add more staff. And then the last one this year is we're adding the 4K program at Horizon. So we're saving money in what we pay dayare centers in the so that $34 $400 we pay for the students but obviously we're going to have our own staff a teacher and aid at Verizon. So again lots of different reasons for staffing changes. Um we could
015get really really into the weeds here. Um but that's kind of the the reasons we have staffing changes. So what we're seeing next year is an increase of staff of 8.65. You can see it on the left hand side what mostly teachers that's going up. Um and then on the right hand side you can see the reason. So enrollment again our enrollment is pretty flat. So really not much enrollment change. Again, we have quite a bit actually enrollment increase at middle schools, but our elementary staffing went down. I did mention the two referendum funded staffing at the high school. I did mention the DLI staffing at North Side and MeteView for second grade. I've mentioned the 4K at Horizon. And then again, there's a lot of different reasons for FTE shift and reclassification, but that's
016a pretty minor decrease there. And then transfer service. Uh we're adding some multiML teachers and special ed teachers. So that's the categories for the staffing changes. Again, a large part of our budget is uh compensation. So just want to spend some time on this. Uh school board approved a 2.95% increase for all the groups. Uh so you can see that for professional educators, they also can earn up to another 1.25% if they receive their uh 24 hours if they do 24 hours of PD. And the total salary increase for teachers if uh is estimated to be about 3.95%. I'll go through this pretty quickly. So it's basically the same for all the groups. Again, 2.9 for 2.95% for COLA and then some PD for all the groups. And you can see the dollars amount there.
017And again, this has been all approved by the school board about maybe a month ago. Um health insurance, we don't have our final rate for January 1, but I'm budgeting a 10% increase. Health insurance actually starts January 1st, so it's a little tricky. Um, so it's really a 5% hit to the budget. Um, but uh, total cost of health insurance is 15.8 million. Dental insurance is projected to no uh, zero increase and $1.4 million budget. And Wisconsin retirement system is projected for a small increase. We'll find that out in July what that increase is actually. And you can see for Wisconsin retirement system, the school district share is $6.3 million. So adding all those things up, our general fund, which is most of our day-to-day operations, our revenue is 162.4 million and expenses also comes
018in at that amount. So we do have a balanced budget for fund 10. Um, just quickly a couple other things. We do have to budget obviously for the referendum dollars that we've taken out in the past and borrowed and then paying those back over the next 20 years. So we have a debt service levy of 9.4 million. Uh you might think that wow that's really low compared to some prior years. But with the referendum from November 5th, we were doing some um somewhat um uh transfers. I'll just say transfers from fund 10 to fund 30. It's all been worked out with our financial advisor. So part of that is we're we're transferring 12.5 million from fund 10 to fund 30. Um and then our transfer amount, just to give you a reference, last year was
01922 million. So the transfer amount is quite a bit less. That debt survey le levy of 9.4 will eventually grow pretty steadily over the next few years to get back to that 23 to 24 million debt levy that we've had say four or five years ago. Community service levy. Um you can see the list of things there. community schools and I won't read through all of them but you can see what it's funds uh and the projected levy is $1,50,000 and then we do have some carryover in fund 80 community service so we will use that we can draw down that a little bit so the projected total levy for the district is um get to my final amount here projected total levy is 91.2 2 million. You can see it broken over the three
020different accounts. That's a 5.3% increase in the levy, which is quite a bit less than last year. Um, our mill rate last year was 10.16 $10.16 and that would drop to $109. So, a 5.3% increase in levy. Um, I am using a 6% increase in property values to get to that mill rate. And the last thing I think I just want to share is our fund balance. So, we've talked about how important it is for district sun to have fund balance um for things like uh rainy day fund and just for uh so we don't have to short-term borrow so much and just so we have budget stabilization. So, a lot of good reasons for fund balance. I won't go into that too much, but uh when we we compare ourselves to other districts, this
021is kind of interesting graph especially for some schoolboard members that have been here a while. districts similar to us in size. Um, in years past, Sun Prairie, which is kind of what the fifth one over from the left, we were over on the right hand side, we had a lower fund balance. We've been building up our fund balance over the last 5 to 10 years. That's been a goal of the school board and administration. So, the good news is we've built up our fund balance um to now we're more in the middle of the pack. Um, so that's really good news. So, just wanted to share that and that helps again with budget stabilization and a lot of things. So, wanted to share that. Um, so what's going to happen? So we and uh Matt
022and Clark especially will be monitoring the bus budget and make adjustments as needed. On July 28th, school board meeting, there'll be a public hearing on the proposed budget. August 25th, the school board will act on the proposed budget. October 6th, the school district holds our annual meeting to set the levy. And then by the end of October, again, a lot of things happen in October um with property values and equalized aid and revenue cap worksheets, but by October 31st, all school boards need to adopt the original budget. And just lastly, just want to say uh thank you. I think most well you all know I'm retiring, so this will be my last screencast. Some of you probably happy about that, but I just want to say it's been an honor to uh work for the
023Sun Prairie School District and um yeah, it's I really appreciate all the things that the school board and administration and staff have um have worked with me on things over the years. So, thank you.