by Sarah Thomack
St. Joseph Post
The St. Joseph School District is facing budget challenges as the state announced deep cuts to education funding earlier this month.
Superintendent Doug Van Zyl says the passing of the 61-cent tax levy last year is one positive.
“I can tell you without that, we’d be in some pretty desperate situations right now.”
Van Zyl says the state will be withholding $2.2 million for the month of June and that will apply to this fiscal year's budget which runs through June 30th.
“If there’s a blessing in this, that may be it because, of course, we did have the opportunity to be closed because of COVID, so we weren’t running buses, we stopped our contract with Apple, so that saved us some dollars,” Van Zyl tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “We’ve been paying our staff and everybody through this time so there really wasn’t huge savings… but now without kids being in school, the budget reductions for this year have a little bit less of an impact”
The district is anticipating and planning for a $2.2 million withholding in July as well.
Van Zyl says roughly 80% of their budget is staff but they don’t anticipate having to make staff reductions in the near future.
“We feel like our budget that was developed should be able to maintain us through this next year,” Van Zyl says. “But we’ve been telling the board and been trying to tell people, at some point, some very tough decisions may have to be made because when we’re paid by the state it’s off of the number of students enrolled in your district and average daily attendance is a factor in that and all of a sudden 2-300 more students don’t show up, that’s a large impact to us financially as well.”
The school district is not only working on adjusting to budget cuts but also on a reentry plan for the fall. According to Van Zyl, the district plans to bring together a reentry committee at the beginning of July made up of staff, students, parents and community members to look at the plan so far. They hope to have a final plan to present in mid-July.