The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

On August 16, 2016, the Big Sandy Board of Trustees reviewed and approved the school budget for the upcoming school year. School budgets are driven by a complex funding formula with student enrollment being the biggest factor affecting budget change. The Montana Legislature has been beneficial to schools the past two sessions with inflationary adjustments in most areas of the budget, and those adjustments have helped out all schools.

Similar to most businesses the school expenses rise each year. We hope to have steady to increasing enrollment to match or exceed what are expenses are each year. Our enrollment is up over a dozen students K-12 from where we ended the school year, and that will have a positive impact on the school budget in the future.

When looking at the total school budget which is comprised of several funds from the general fund, transportation, technology, adult education etc, the bottom line we carefully consider is the local property tax requirements. Many of our funds are capped at a certain level, and we have little say in those amounts. Some funds are more volatile such as transportation which is calculated based on miles the buses run and fuel and driver costs. Due to less population in the rural community we chose to eliminate 2 bus routes that had little to no ridership. That change lowered our transportation budget significantly. If students move into those areas again we can consider running those routes. When the proposed budget is put together, it is the goal of the district to have a budget to meet our needs, without any local property tax increase. There are many variables to that, and we have to look at it from year to year. For the 2016-17 school year, the trustees approved a total general fund budget for both schools of $1,779,911, which is an increase of about $15,000 over last year’s general fund budget. The good news is that even though the budget increased slightly we were able to lower mills assessed from 152.48 in 2015-16 to 149.53 for the current year. It is not a huge decrease but at least we were able to have a decrease.

The budget summary of all funds is available on the home page of the school website at http://www.bigsandy.k12.mt.us If you have any questions about the budget please feel free to drop me an email or give me a call. Thanks again for supporting the students of Big Sandy Schools.