June 4, 2020
By: Dwayne Page
The DeKalb County Budget Committee got its first look at the proposed 2020-21 school budget during a meeting Wednesday evening at the courthouse.
Director of Schools Patrick Cripps reviewed with the committee highlights of the budget as adopted by the DeKalb County Board of Education last month.
Cripps said the budget includes a $2,000 pay raise (including the 2% state increase) per certified employee and a $1,000 increase (locally funded) for each non-certified support staff employee.
“We are trying to improve teacher pay because we (DeKalb County) still lag behind the state average weighted teacher salary by about $3,000,” said Cripps.
Funds are included in the school budget for the purchase of 24.5 acres of property on North Congress Boulevard near Northside Elementary School for construction of a new pre-K to 2nd grade elementary school. The price is $18,000 per acre for a total of $441,000. The purchase is subject to favorable core drilling and a TDOT traffic study. The school budget includes $500,000 from the BEP technology fund to cover the cost.
A 3.5% increase in funds is included to help absorb anticipated higher employee health insurance costs.
“When we first started creating our budget the state said our insurance would go up possibly by as much as 8%. We budgeted for an increase of 3.5% but the great unknown is how many people (employees) are going to pickup insurance (through school system) after all this (COVID 19) has happened. Since COVID 19 we have had some employees come in whose spouse had lost their job and benefits and needed to pick up insurance with us,” said Cripps.
To help hold down overall costs and the need for seeking new local tax revenue, Director Cripps said efforts have been made to move funds around among the budgetary line items. “We try our very best to move money around from one category to the next,” he said. For example technology funding will be used to help cover increased costs of textbooks needed to meet the state curriculum.
“In the past we have budgeted $350,000 for textbooks but in one year it’s jumped to $475,000. We’re looking at books costing us from $250 to $300 apiece. We moved money from our technology line and last year we were able to purchase 2 buses so we moved that money (for a bus this year) over to the budgetary line item for books as well,” said Cripps. Plans are to purchase one new school bus this year instead of two.
The state will also be continuing funding for ACT testing next school year.
“The state sent us money last year for ACT testing but due to COVID 19 we were unable to test our eleventh grade students. They asked us to roll that money over to our new budget to test both the eleventh graders and twelfth graders this year,” Cripps continued.
The budget committee took no action on the school budget Wednesday night.
The county budget committee is made up of members Jeff Barnes, Anita Puckett, Sabrina Farler, and Jerry Adcock. All were present for the Wednesday night meeting. Last week County Mayor Tim Stribling announced during the regular monthly meeting of the county commission that he was appointing Dr. Scott Little to fill a vacancy on the budget committee. Stribling also appointed Barnes as chairman of the committee. But since no commission vote was taken to confirm the appointments, a special called conference call meeting of the county commission will be held Monday night, June 8 at 6:45 p.m. to make the appointments official, subject to a favorable vote. WJLE will broadcast the meeting LIVE. During Wednesday night’s meeting, the budget committee appointed Barnes to serve as temporary chairman in the meantime.