One of the clearest ways to see what an organization values is to look at its budget. How does it allocate its resources? What gets the most money? What gets left out and why?
The process of setting ANCS’s budget each year–which our board’s finance and operations committee is doing right now for next school year–takes us through these important questions. As the recipients of taxpayer dollars, what guides our budgeting are what our school’s governing board has established as priorities in our mission and our strategic plan. Especially when resources are limited–as they, unfortunately, have often been in public education–having agreed-upon goals helps us to make the best use of these dollars.
Kari Lovell, our Director of Finance and Operations, and I have worked with the finance and operations committee to develop a first draft of the fiscal year 2019 budget for ANCS that reflects the priorities of our mission and strategic plan while accounting for projections about local and state revenue. There are two main areas of focus for a significant increase in the investment of our resources:
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- Reducing class size: During the bottom of the economic recession, the ANCS board voted to increase class size to help us balance the budget. In our strategic plan adopted in the fall of 2014, we committed to eventually lowering class sizes again to better support personalized teaching and learning that are part of ANCS’s mission. Our school’s leadership team developed a plan for moving from 18 to 16 students in each kindergarten classroom, from 24 to 22 students in classrooms in grades 1st-5th, and from 27 to 25 in our middle school classrooms. Our draft FY19 budget takes us closer to these targets.
- Employee compensation that attracts and retains high-quality teachers and staff: By far the largest percentage of our annual operating budget goes towards our teachers and staff for salaries, benefits, professional development, and maintaining a low teacher-to-student ratio, testament to our belief that investing in the people who work directly with students is the biggest driver of positive student outcomes. We will dedicate even more funding to this area of our budget next school year. The board has already approved two changes: a significant boost to the salary scale for our associate teachers and nutrition staff and a new tenure bonus program that will provide annual bonuses of increasingly higher amounts (from $2,500 to $9,000) to employees as they move through their years of service. The draft budget also includes a minimum of a 2% cost-of-living salary increase for teachers and staff.
Allocating more funds to these two areas is possible for a few reasons. First, we’ve spent the past few fiscal years accumulating funds to build a healthy set of reserves for emergencies and for major capital needs, so we anticipate being able to reduce the amount of funding we are adding to existing reserves. Second, we project a small increase in local and state funding, with state revenue expected to be up about 1% and local revenue increasing, with the final amount depending upon the resolution of outstanding issues stemming from Fulton County’s property tax assessments from last year. Though we also have a 4% higher contribution amount we are required to make to the state retirement system on behalf of teachers and staff, we still have drafted a budget that ends up with a small projected net operating income.
If you would like to hear more about the proposed ANCS budget for next school year, you can attend the ANCS governing board meeting scheduled for tonight at 6:30 PM at the middle campus or the board meeting on May 15th at 6:30 at the elementary campus. As well, there will be another public budget meeting on May 9th after morning meeting at the elementary campus. You are also welcome to email me (munderwood@atlncs.org) or the board’s treasurer, Ryan Camp (rcamp@atlncs.org), with any questions or feedback you might have.