School board approves preliminary budget; estimated revenue budget for 2024-25 school year is $61 million (2024)

ALEXANDRIA — Alexandria School Board members approved the 2024-25 preliminary budget at their Monday, June 17 meeting. And it’s a good thing they did.

Trevor Peterson, director of Business Services for Alexandria Public Schools, said that school districts across the state had to have preliminary budgets approved before July 1 or operations could have ceased.

“That wouldn’t be a good thing,” he told the board members. “People have heard about the state shutdown type thing and that’s kind of what this would be. We would not be allowed to incur any expenditures and receive any revenue if there’s not a budget approved by June 30.”

He said that the budget is definitely preliminary as there are still plenty of unknowns. The district will go through the revision process at least twice in a year so that it can capture trend adjustments, enrollment trends and enrollment changes.

And also, staffing is not yet in place for the 2024-25 school year as there are some contracts that have yet to be settled. He said the budget will be adjusted as those become finalized. Peterson said his department would also continue to monitor the impact of COVID relief funding as that is coming to an end.

Enrollment, which is a key driver on the revenue side, will also be monitored, he said, noting that there are many variables including enrollment projections, retention rates, kindergarten projects compared to previous years and more.

When trying to figure out the enrollment, Peterson said he tends to stay more on the conservative side otherwise the district could end up making some difficult decisions in the middle of the year in regard to staffing.

He expects enrollment to stay pretty steady, although there are a lot of things that can change between now and the start of the school year in September.

The 2024-25 preliminary revenue budget is estimated at about $61 million. The final revenue budget for 2023-24 was $61.145 million.

For expenditures, the estimated budget for 2024-25 is $59.98 million, while the final for 2023-24 was $60.03 million.

The end of the year fund balance for 2023-24 was at $4.79 million with the estimate for 2024-25 is at $5.8 million. The school district strives to maintain an unassigned general fund balance ranging from 11% to 16% of the annual general fund operating expenditures.

Peterson said at the end of 2022-23, the district was at 6% and then for the 2023-24 fiscal year it was about 8%.

“If everything works out, we would be at about 9.7% at the end of 2024-25 fiscal year,” he said. “We are making strides in the right direction. Having it trending in this direction feels good.”

School board members heard from Janeen Peterson, director of Food and Nutrition Services, as well as Sue Green and Maggie Johnson, who are members of the Alexandria School District Student Wellness Committee.

Green and Johnson talked about activities and themes for each month. For instance, the focus in March was on mental health. At Discovery Middle School there was a Mental Health Fair for students, there were classroom activities at the elementary schools and a newsletter was sent to families. And in April, the focus was on thoughtfulness. Students wrote notes of gratitude and there were other classroom activities for all grade levels.

Peterson talked about some strategies for the 2024-25 school year, including looking for more locally sourced foods and handing out samples of new foods students may not have tried before, like watermelon radishes. She even brought some samples for school board members and those in the audience to try.

She also talked about the success of the bulk milk program, where instead of cartons of milk, students pour their own milk out of a bulk tank system.

Kevin Brezina, director of the district’s Technology Department, provided an update on the district’s technology plan.

A few of the items included:

• Explore the options of expanding Esports to the middle school level.
• Look at tools that may allow parents to review student usage of school issued devices at home.
• Partner with the high school to integrate technology classes into the curriculum such as desktop support, computer science and computer programming.
• Use technology to support students’ learning styles. Currently the district supports Chromebooks, lab PCs, iPads and Macbooks for students based upon the classroom need.

Some of the highlights from the past school year that Brezina included in his presentation were as follows:

• “Where’s the Bus” has been fully integrated to ensure student ridership apps continue to show information.
• Timeclock Plus and Smartfind Express have been fully integrated to give staff more information regarding their workweek.
• There was a reduction of more than 20 printers districtwide in support of lowering printing costs.
• Most staff members have moved to Google office suite, which is a savings of $20,000 in Microsoft licensing.

Celeste Edenloff is the special projects editor and a reporter for the Alexandria Echo Press. She has lived in the Alexandria Lakes Area since 1997. She first worked for the Echo Press as a reporter from 1999 to 2011, and returned in 2016 to once again report on the community she calls home.