Budget Process Under Way In Oswego School District

OSWEGO – The Oswego School Board got started on the 2018-19 budget process. Members received an overview of the capital component of the budget at Tuesday night’s meeting.

“The budget process is really a three-pronged process,” Dr. Dean Goewey, superintendent, told the board Tuesday. “The first step is to gather data.”

The administration will project salaries from payroll, analyze the three-year history of revenue and expenditures, and analyze the Governor’s preliminary state aid runs.

“Historically, and it will be true this year, we anticipate, that the legislative budget will come out in a few weeks, hopefully, and usually gives us more money than the Governor’s proposed budget,” the superintendent said.

Then, he said, they will meet with the shareholders in the district. That includes building principals and department heads. After that, the superintendent will meet with his cabinet on internal requests.

“We’ll try to prioritize the things we heard from the stakeholders,” he said.

To prepare for the ensuing budget discussions, Dr. Goewey will:

• Calculate the tax cap

• Incorporate additional internal requests in the budget

• Consider use of fund balance for possible gap (budget shortfall).

At first glance, the superintendent said, it looks as if the district will receive more state aid than last year.

For this school year, the district received $15,105,113 in foundation aid. So far, $15,718,498 is projected for 2018-19.

Districts have the most flexibility with foundation aid, the superintendent pointed out, because they can use it for whatever they want.

BOCES aid is also projected up as well as aid for high cost students, software library textbook, transportation and building aid among others.

“Our total aid is $30,586,000 which is about $5.3 million increase,” Dr. Goewey said.

The district is paying debt service on a half-dozen projects currently. The over all amount of borrowing stands at $82,207,772. The total principal is $5,120,213 and interest is $2,028,486.

The years remaining range from zero on one of the projects to 11 and 10 on the two longest.

The facilities and maintenance budget shows a slight overall decrease for the next school year, the superintendent said.

Salaries show a bump of $129,918 due to the collective bargaining settlement with CSEA, the superintendent said.

But, overall, this area is currently $5,083,096 and is projected to be $4,932,190 for a 3 percent decrease.

“So, our total capital budget, which is our debt service and our facilities – maintenance, for our current year is $13,859,855 and our proposed budget is $12,831,831,” Dr. Goewey said.

On April 3, the board will review the second component, the administrative budget, the superintendent said, adding that by that time they hope to have some good news regarding funding from the state.

“We’re quiet confident that we’re in a place at the ’18-19 budget where we’re not looking at reductions,” he said. “We did a lot of work last year in right-sizing our instructional class sizes in the elementary. Right now, our class sizes are kind of sitting pretty. We have a couple pockets of larger class sizes.”

After he has put all three parts of the budget together, it will be up to the board to decide how high or low they want to go with the tax levy, he added.

“We’ll get your feedback and see how do we get the most bang for our buck,” he told the board. “Then, we’ll move on from there.”

The superintendent will make more presentations to the board and workshops will be held next month to hammer out the budget details.

The next board meeting will be April 3.

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