The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 10/24/2022. At 6PM, they held a public hearing for the 2022-2023 budget, and a 6:45PM they held their regular board meeting at which they approved the budget.
During the regular board meeting, Superintendent Greg Hartjes also provided the Business Services Report in which he discussed the estimated tax impact on property owner should the two referendum questions be approved and explained why they had been estimating the impact would be $39 per $100,000 worth of property but had now been able to revise that estimate down to $4 per $100,000 worth of property.
I have prepared transcripts of both the public hearing and Superintendent Hartjes’ Business Services report to the Board of Education.
At a high level, the total 2022-2023 AASD budget is projected to be $243.9 million, assuming the referendum questions are approved. These funds for those expenditures will come from the federal government, the state, and local property taxes.
State equalization aid will increase by nearly $3.7 million to $98.4 million. If the referendum questions are approved, money from property taxes would amount to around $74.5 million.
Of the district’s total budget, over 80% consists of the general fund which is their main operating fund. This is increasing by $3.27 million to $199.9 million.
The revenue in the general fund is…
- 58% from the state
- 28% from local taxes
- 8% from inter-district sources (mostly due to open enrollment)
- 6% from federal grants
- Less than 1% from other sources
The 2022-2023 general budget includes salary increases of about $3 million, benefit increases of $3.2 million, and purchased services (i.e. transportation, custodial, and other contracted services) increases of $4 million.
The 2022-2023 budget also includes $8 million in unspent dollars carried over from the 2021-2022 budget. Some of this was due to positions going unfilled. Regarding the unfilled positions, Executive Director of Finance Holly Burr told the Board, “It’s a positive for the fiscal bottom line, but definitely not a positive for the the schools or the students. So we would much rather see these positions being filled. So I know Julie [King, Chief HR Officer,] and her crew worked very hard at that, but I just don’t think we have the workforce anymore that we used to.”
For the 2022-23 budget about $22 million will be transferred from the General Fund to Fund 27, which is the Special Education Fund, in order to cover increased costs. Ms. Burr told the board, “Every year [the Special Education Fund] creeps up. Expenses are higher. But also the needs of the students are higher and enrollment in Special Ed does not seem to go down. So every year we see increases in that fund.” She also said that for every dollar AASD spent on special education, they got about 30 cents back from the state. The remainder needed to be made up in other ways. There were some grants available. [I think it would be beneficial to, at some later meeting, give a more in-depth overview of special education at AASD, breaking it down by the different services provided, the number of students receiving those services, the general reasons why students are receiving those services, and the reason why demand for special education services keeps increasing.]
AASD saw declining enrollment every year for the 5 years between the 2017-2018 and 2021-2022 school years, and during that time-period saw enrollment decrease by 1,315 students, 504 of whom were lost between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school year and 933 of whom were lost during the entire pandemic.
This year the district did see a total enrollment increase of 52 over last year’s count. [At that rate, it will only be 17 more years before they get back to pre-pandemic levels.] At the same time, however, they lost around 120 voucher-eligible students to private schools. Superintendent Hartjes told the Board that, although the district is not given an exact number of district students who utilize vouchers, they can work backwards using the amount of money the district passes on to the voucher program. This year, private school vouchers increased by $1,091,563. Individual vouchers are worth around $9,000, so dividing the total amount of vouchers by the amount of individual vouchers gives a result of 121. Also of note, utilizing that same math, it appears that around 620 students total within the Appleton Area School District boundaries are utilizing the Wisconsin’s Parental Choice Program. Nearly 20% of those began utilizing the program this school year.
During the Public Hearing, Superintendent Hartjes expressed concern about the impact of inflation. “So you saw the number on contracted services. And that’s anything that we don’t perform, that’s work we don’t do so that is transportation, that is cleaning, that’s a maintenance. Those are the numbers that really scare us, because in a normal year, we see a four to $5 million increase in contracted services when we put in health insurance. And that’s when the inflation rate was 2 to 3 to 4%. Now we’re seeing inflation rates that are twice that, which is why our contracted services are much higher this year. And that is where our challenge is. And so that’s what we try to share as much as possible with our community, just understanding we want to be able to afford our inflationary operation increases every year. And contracted services are really going to be a challenge for us.”
Also of note, Board Member Jim Bowman expressed the belief that the district was going to need an increase in the revenue limit, saying, “To avoid having to take more money out of fund balance in future years, we’re gonna need an increase in the revenue limit. This this revenue limit freeze in the current budget is a major problem for us along with other districts. So we really need the legislature to act on that and to and to fund us—to raise the revenue limit and fund us appropriately given that increase.”
View full public hearing details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CJBH7246FBA2
View full public hearing video here: https://youtu.be/Ph9wK3BeVkA
View full regular board meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CJNRE76D547D
View full regular board meeting video here: https://youtu.be/Ml1eUOaSX5Y
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