McDonald schools express need for levy

By Mary Smith

news@vindy.com

McDONALD

The McDonald School District will end fiscal-year 2010 in the black but will go more and more in debt over the next four years without passage of a new levy, the district treasurer said.

The district will end 2011 with a fund balance of $239,912, due largely to the many cuts the district has made after being placed in state fiscal emergency in October 2009, Treasurer Brian Stidham told the board of education Wednesday.

The district also will use $509,000 in federal stimulus money through the Ohio Department of Education and State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, which will all be used in fiscal-year 2011.

Without a new operating levy, the district will be in the red by $523,512 in 2012, escalating to a negative balance of $2.01 million by 2015.

The treasurer has created a second possible scenario for the five-year forecast to include a possible 9.5-mill levy, which will mean a negative balance of $294,866 in 2012 but then allow for some small but positive balances for the next three years of $13,700 in 2013, $273,686 in 2014 and $47,711 in 2015.

Because of the more than $800,000 in cuts made by the district this year, projections are that the district will not have to go back to the State Solvency Assistance for another loan this year, Stidham said, after the district borrowed $2 million to cover fiscal-year 2010.

Approval of any plan to go for a levy, probably next spring, must first come from the local school board and be approved by the State Financial Planning and Supervision Commission.

A new three-year contract with the district’s nine nonteaching employees has been approved with no wage increases except step increases from Sept. 1, 2010, to Aug. 31, 2013.

The school nurse has been cut from full time to part time, and funds are not available to pay her overtime to do all the testing on kindergarten, third-, fifth- and ninth-grade students, schools Superintendent Barry Morrison said.