By Kathryn Schiliro
Managing Editor

Halfway through the fiscal year, the Morgan County School System's financial report – which is “as good as it can be” for this time of year, Superintendent Dr. Ralph Bennett said – benefitted from state reminbursement of funds in December.

Receipts for December totaled more than $4.4 million, compared to November’s receipts of more than $2.7 million.
The system’s operating fund started last month with more than $2.8 million and, after the receipts and near $2.4 million in expenditures, ended December with near $5 million.

Local revenues, coming from property taxes, were “still slightly down,” Bennett said. To date this fiscal year, the system’s collected more than $4.7 million out of the more than $11.8 million budgeted amount. At 50 percent of the way through FY13, that’s about 40 percent of the budget. Historically, these local revenues should soon pick up.
“I think the month of January we'll start to catch up,” Bennett said.

To date, the system’s collected more than $11.7 million of its budgeted near $25.5 million in total revenues, or 46 percent.
As far as expenditures to date – again, 50 percent through FY13 – the system’s spent more than $13.4 million of the budgeted more than $27.4 million, or almost 49 percent. This is about 1.5 percentage points below where the system was this time last fiscal year, Bennett said.

The Education Local Option Sales Tax (ELOST) balance for December totals just over $3 million following a beginning balance of $3.2 million, more than $283,000 in receipts and more than $432,000 in expenditures.

The vast majority of ELOST expenditures – more than $411,000 – went to Kevin Price General Contractors for construction of the new classroom building at Morgan County High School. The system also spent $16,000 on a truck from Youngblood Motors.

For the past two months, ELOST collections have been down from the average of just over $300,000. November saw receipts of more than $296,000 while December receipts totaled more than $283,000.

In other ELOST news, Director of Operations Bob Monk let the school board know, at their meeting earlier this month, that the system received quotes from three vendors for furniture for the new classroom building. A decision about which to use will be made later this month.

The school nutrition fund began December with just over $269,000 and, after receipts of almost $115,000 and expenditures of $110,000, ended the month with $274,000.

Printed in the January 24, 2013 edition.