School board lowers tax rate

Salado ISD Trustees adopted a $14 million operating budget following a public hearing on the matter Aug. 31 and dropped the tax rate from $1.26 per $100 valuation to $1.2238 per $100 valuation.

The tax rate maintains the $1.0400 maintenance and operation tax rate but lowers the debt service tax rate to $0.1838.

View the 2016-17 Salado ISD Adopted Budget here.

View the 2015-16 Salado Final Amended Budget here.

The budget is built on an enrollment of 1792 and an increase of 8.2 percent in the average daily attendance over last year. On the first day of school, Salado ISD enrolled 1,750 students, but Superintendent Michael Novotny said that enrollement historically increases after the Labor Day holiday.

The enrollment increase, bolstered by 256 transfer students, will help generate an increase in state funding of more than $800,000. Transfer students represent almost 15 percent of total student enrollment. Last year, Salado ISD accepted 237 transfer students.

The total budget is almost $900,00 more than last year. The majority of that increase is an increase of $595,000 in instruction expenses. Instructional resources, however, drop considerably from $356,535 to $208,820. School leadership increase almost $50,000 to $917,831, or 6.5 percent of the total budget. Plant maintenance and operations drop by more than $120,000 to $ $1.48 million.

Extra and co-curricular expenses increase by $157,000 (over 16 percent) to $1.06 million, or 7.5 percent of the budget.

Trustees also adopted a final amended budget for 2015-16 that is more than $1 million higher in expenditures than the budget adopted in fall 2015. The amended budget shows $14.3 million in total expenditures compared to the adopted budget of $13.2 million.

Revenues in the amended budget are more than $500,000 higher than the adopted budget of $13.2 million.

The amended budget shows a deficit of more than $500,00. However, Dr. Novotny said that “I don’t anticipate we will have a deficit (or if we do, it will be a much smaller one and only because we purchased the house on Salado School Road).”

“We intentionally increase the expenditures in each function higher than we really need just to cover ourselves,” he said, adding,  “because if we spend more than the amount budgeted in any of the functions then we get a finding in our audit.”

The 2014-15 amended budget showed a deficit of $560,000 but the disrict ended with a small surplus.