We received some information regarding the Sun Prairie school district budget for fiscal 2010-11 this past week. We know...we know....Madison is just about set with their budget. They're down to the last $5M of cuts from a $30M initial deficit.Spending
The General Fund Expenditures is projected to rise 7.2% (the same as the mill rate) to $72,486,582. The revised budget (removing $1.2M) for the current 2009-10 year included expenditures of $68,825,330.
Tax Levy
The tax levy is projected to rise 8.3% from the $44.25M approved by electors at the annual meeting last year. As the community was warned last year....their efforts culminated in only a 1-year fix to property tax woes. Unless more permanent measures are undertaken curb spending, or the overall value of real property in the district booms again, then property taxes will continue to rise.
Mill Rate
The current projection is for a mill rate of about $12.05, a 7.2% rise over 2009-10. The good news is this has already dropped from a projected 7.6% increase 2 months ago.
How much of the increase is related to the new high school?
If you look back at pre-referendum propaganda, we were told that the $96M High School/CHUMS construction would add $1.23 to the mill rate. The pool would add another $0.10, for a total of $1.33 on about $100M of new construction.
Since the 2007-08 school year, pre-construction time, the mill rate has risen from $10.03 to $12.05, an increase of $2.02. If the $100M would add 1.33 to the mill rate, then $0.69 per $1000 came from somewhere else.
In reality, the cost proved to be less than the projections, which were made based on assumptions of a 5.00% interest rate (we've gotten much lower than that), but it also was based on 5% annual growth in the equalized value (and we know that has been more like 1%).
Referendum debt service is tracked via a separate "fund". The General Fund (or "Fund 10") has risen from $61M to $72.5M. That means that outside of the new construction, our budget expenditures have increased by 19% ($11.5M) over the 3 year span, or an average of 6.33% per year.
The 800 lb gorilla in the room
We are frequently told that approximately 85% of the budget is consumed by salaries and benefits. That would mean that just shy of $10M (85% of the 3-year expenditure increase) in personnel costs have been incurred in just 3 years. That's a lot of personnel...the equivalent of about 100 or so new administrators!
Of course, district enrollment has increased from about 6000 in 2007-08 to the projection of about 6600 (excluding 4K kids, who are taught outside of the school system). So that's about 600 additional kids IN the Sun Prairie schools. The total is closer to 1000 if you count SP4K...but since those kids are not taught by SPASD employees, they can't be included in the total. And we've added about 82 total staff during that time.
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