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Fayette schools flunk budget testTue, 08/04/2009 - 4:24pm
By: Ben Nelms
County ranks 12th worst in socking away reserve funds for bad times — like now While Fayette County residents boast of their school system’s high state ranking on student performance tests, most may not know of a crucial measure in which the local system ranks near the bottom in Georgia: rainy day reserve funds. A critical measure of the Fayette system’s financial contingency planning takes shape in a comparison with Georgia’s other school systems. Where do other school systems stand in terms of ending the school year with a fund balance as a percentage of total expenditures and where does Fayette County stand in comparison? The answer is that Fayette barely stands at all. Fayette ranks as the 12th worst among 170 of Georgia’s reporting public school systems in having reserve funds tucked away at the end of its budget year, according to figures compiled by the Georgia Department of Education. Put another way, 158 school systems do a better job of maintaining a rainy day reserve fund than Fayette does. That means Fayette is more likely than almost all other Georgia school systems to be adversely affected by dips in tax revenues — both local and state — during the current economic recession, simply because the local system maintains such a small store of reserve cash. The most current figures on the ending fund balance for the school year and the percentage of total expenditures those amounts represent comes from DOE for fiscal year ending June 30, 2008. The report accounted for 170 districts, representing nearly all of Georgia’s 180 school districts. As might be expected, the range of fund balances held by school systems across Georgia at the end of a fiscal year is across the spectrum, though the percentages as a function of total expenditures is more telling. For example, huge Gwinnett County on June 30, 2008, had a fund balance of $145,099,969, or 10.98 percent, compared to rural Jefferson County, with a population of approximately 17,000, that had ended the same year with $4,524,206, or 19.04 percent. DOE reported that Fayette ended the school year on June 30, 2008, with a balance of $1,809,506, representing .92 percent of total expenditures. Fayette’s budget for the 2007-2008 fiscal year totaled approximately $191 million. Commenting on the Fayette percentage, Superintendent John DeCotis said the school board in recent years has weathered many funding cuts. And while the Fayette system may not end some years with a large surplus, he said students continue to receive a high quality education while parents, until recently, have seen millage rate cuts. “When the state started the austerity cuts in 2000 we started cutting things, but not things involving students like fine arts, expanded Advanced Placement, class sizes, parapros and nurses. We reduced central office staff, stopped step increases and cut maintenance projects, but we didn’t cut the extra programs that other school systems don’t fund. Others raised their millage rates to build a fund balance, but we reduced ours and returned the money to the taxpayers. Up until last year we were lowering the millage rate,” DeCotis said. The DOE data showed that only 11 other school districts in Georgia in 2008, all of which are relatively rural, had a smaller percentage than Fayette. Those included Baker, Chattahoochee, Clay, Hancock, Haralson, Jackson, Laurens, Turner, Warren, Wheeler and Wilkinson counties. Across Georgia, the 2008 ending fund balance as a percentage of total expenditures ranged from -5.28 percent in Chattahoochee County in west Georgia — one of the state’s poorest counties — to tiny Glascock County in east central Georgia with 47.31 percent. By way of comparison, neighboring Coweta County ended 2008 at 11.90 percent, Forsyth County showed 19.72 percent, Cobb County came in at 13.98 percent and Fulton recorded 14.13 percent. The Fayette County School System fared somewhat better for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, though Fayette remained far below most systems in terms of its fund balance as a percentage of total expenditures. Year’s end on June 30, 2006 showed Fayette with 3.34 percent while in 2007 the school system recorded 3.37 percent. Of the 170 school systems noted on the DOE survey, only 21 had a lower percentage than Fayette in 2006 and only 13 were lower than Fayette in 2007. And as in 2008, nearly all the school systems, with the exception of DeKalb County, were relatively rural cities and counties. login to post comments
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