Tuesday, September 23, 2008
By Mary Smith
The district is ranked in the bottom three of Ohio schools for expenditures per student, a state report shows.
McDONALD — The McDonald Board of Education passed a resolution supporting the village’s application for a “Safe Routes to School” grant for new sidewalks here.
Noting that 80 percent of the district’s students walk to school, the board also instructed Superintendent Michael Wasser to assist village officials on behalf of the board in any administrative functions necessary to secure the Safe Routes to School grant.
McDonald is again seeking a $250,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Transportation, and applied for the grant in 2007 but learned late in the year it would not received the money.
The application process has changed because there were so many applicants the first year, the board learned at its Monday meeting.
The village must now submit the route the sidewalks will take to the state by early October. If that is approved, the village will be pre-approved to make an application for the grant.
The board also adopted an annual appropriation for fiscal year 2009 of $7.624 million, which reflects no increase from the fiscal year 2008 budget.
The budget sets aside $766,000 in debt service funds, including the repayment of a $600,000, one-year note. The board took out the note last year to help with cash flow for the first year after the board offered an early-retirement incentive bonus and a new health insurance policy, schools Treasurer Thomas Radabaugh said.
The savings for those two items are expected to show up this year and allow the board to repay the note at the full $600,000 by June 2009 when it is due.
The board also has to make a yearly payment of $160,000 to the Ohio School Facilities Commission for a 23-year note that was approved by voters in 1999 for a 3.2-mill bond issue to help pay for an OSFC renovation of the high school and building the new Roosevelt Elementary School, totalling more than $17 million.
Radabaugh noted that the latest Ohio Department of Education Cupp Report, which is a rundown of how much is spent statewide per district on per-pupil costs, has been released and shows that McDonald is the third-lowest spending district per pupil in the state out of 614 school districts at $6,930 per pupil for the 2006-07 school year, the most recent year of the report.
The Cupp Report has been turning out various data of on Ohio schools for years, Radabaugh said.
Radabaugh said the district spends so little compared to some other districts because that is all the income it has from the state and the local tax base, which is low.
“We are consistently spending less every year,” Radabaugh said, adding that pinching pennies has helped keep the district in the black up until now, with expectations that without any changes from the state, the district will have a good cash flow in future years.
“We have limited resources, but academically and athletically we’ve done a pretty good job with what we have,” the treasurer said. The district recently learned it had been ranked “excellent” for the 2007-08 school year. It had been rated as “effective” for the 2006-07 school year.