Funding questions a concern at Caverna

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September 15, 2011

Funding questions a concern at Caverna

By GINA KINSLOW Glasgow Daily Times The Glasgow Daily Times Thu Sep 15, 2011, 10:55 AM CDT

HORSE CAVE — Caverna Independent School District officials are frustrated that they don’t know what their SEEK allocation will be for this school year.

“We won’t really know what we got until March,” said Dr. Sam Dick, superintendent.

The Caverna Board of Education approved the school district’s 2012-13 working budget last week. The budget totals to slightly more than $8.3 million and is basically the same was what was the district budgeted for the 2011-12 school year.

Usually, by September district officials have a basic idea of what the SEEK allocation will be. That number is updated in January and again in March.

“Now they are just going to skip all of that, which actually we would rather have preliminary numbers,” said Penny Boeckmann, finance director. “We have no idea what our SEEK number is at this point.”

The working budget is one of three the school board approves. In January the school board approves a draft budget and by May 31 it must approve a tentative budget. The working budget must be approved by Oct. 31, she said.

Because district officials don’t know what the SEEK allocation will be, they are trying to estimate their budget conservatively.

“Generally, we try to start where we were with last year’s budget and then, as she was saying, as time goes on we continue to modify that budget with information we get from them,” Dick said. “But in this particular case, due to the memo we received, that won’t occur until March.”

The district is in no danger of laying off employees because officials don’t know the SEEK allocation, he said.

“We foresaw some of the economic problems that were coming, Penny did, so we battened down the hatches two or three years ago and now we’re just trying to weather the storm,” Dick said.

Caverna has no major projects scheduled for the school year so funding for projects is not a problem either.

“The next big project we are looking at was going to be our heating and cooling [at the high school]. We can go ahead and start that preliminary work, but there will be no bonding until we know [what the SEEK allocation is],” Dick said. “We were hoping to start that process at Christmas.”

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Funding questions a concern at Caverna

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