Augusta School District to deal with budget shortfall
AUGUSTA - To understand how the Augusta School District found itself with a deficit in its 2024-25 school year budget, you have to look at the problem on two tracks, short term and long term.
On the short term track, it was mistake in the budget that was discovered in late October that caused Superintendent Reed Pecha to look more closely at the district budget and what he found alarmed him.
"It was an accounting mistake, an oversight that had no malicious intent to it," Pecha said. "We had budgeted a grant as revenue for $350,000 to purchase new school buses. But we never budgeted the grant as an expense, so we never got the money because those grants require you spend it, to list it as a line item, in order to get the grant. We don't do this and now we're short $350,000 worth of revenue from the budget and that threw everything off."
As a result of this mistake, Pecha went through the budget again through the late fall and found other problems in the numbers, such as programs and staff developed and brought as the school handled the COVID pandemic from 2020-22 that weren't taken out of as line items even though the school was losing the State and Federal funding to pay for these programs. Then there were rising costs for food service and fuel due to various inflationary reasons that went beyond the numbers in the original budget. Students with special education needs moving into the district to go to school in Augusta as the district is only reimbursed 29 percent of the cost of their education from the state. And all this was on top of staff raises recommended by former Superintendent Ryan Nelson that were ultimately approved by the school board and the annual meeting of electors in the school district back in September of 2024.
As Pecha was getting his feet wet in his new job that he took over in July of last year, he learned from other superintendents of a computer program called Baird Budget Model that districts use to put together school budgets. Augusta has used this in the past but the subscription for it (one has to renew yearly) expired. Pecha re-subscribed and thus, through its budget modeling formulas, found the deficit that he explained in detail to Augusta citizens during a community meeting held last week Wednesday, Feb. 4 in the middle/high school auditorium.
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