2007 School Budget Information
The 2007 Budget for the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation will be officially adopted in early September, 2006.
Indiana State law requires that our school Board adopts a budget before September 20 each year for the upcoming year.
School budgets have a significant impact on local property taxes and usually draw the attention of the media. The sheer size of the E-VSC budget exceeds every other county or city budget in the area and includes spending of nearly $200 million. Where does all the money go? Equally important, where does all the money come from? This article is an effort to make the E-VSC budget more understandable. Let’s take a closer look.
Please keep in mind that the E-VSC is a very big operation that serves around 22,300 students during the school year. Some of the services for our children include busing many students to and from school, feeding students in the school cafeterias, giving first aid to ill or injured children, maintaining and keeping clean the school buildings and, of course, welcoming and teaching every student by our gifted teachers. It’s a system that economists call “labor intensive.” This means that machines cannot do the job—we need people.
It should not be a surprise that employee expenses are the largest category of spending in the budget. The 2007 General Fund Budget has over 95% of its spending aimed at employees. (Click link below for graph of General Fund spending.)
The 2007 General Fund Budget is just over $144 million and covers everything from teacher salaries to supplies. For example, money is budgeted for the just-hired Coordinator of Multicultural Education and Student Achievement. What’s not in the budget? Expenses for buildings, renovations, school buses, and money owed through borrowing (Debt Service) are not included in the 2007 General Fund Budget. There are other funds in addition to the General Fund that pay for these things. When added together, they make up the nearly $200 million overall budget. (Click link to graph of all funds below.)
Why do we have all these separate funds? One reason is that Indiana State law requires that we maintain separate funds so that taxpayers know how much school corporations spend in each category. For example, once tax monies are designated and collected for school bus replacement, those monies cannot be used for any other purpose. That’s why school corporations can have $2 million budgeted for buying buses and no money available for adding teachers. For those of us accustomed to managing a family budget where one dollar is as good as the next for meeting the needs of the household, it can seem strange to have a system like this one. But again, these are the mandates of Indiana State law.
Of all the eight funds, you can see that the General Fund is the largest one by far. The General Fund increased by about $3.6 million from last year’s General Fund Budget due to the formula the State uses for all school corporations.
It should be noted that not every increase in the General Fund budget means a tax increase for Vanderburgh County property owners. The money used to pay for some items comes from State government. Other budget items, like Adult Basic Education, are supported in part by fees paid by those who enroll in the classes. Certainly, local property taxes do pay for a significant portion of the budget. (A chart that breaks down the sources of revenue that support the General Fund can be seen by clicking below.)
Each year for the past several years, the State of Indiana has reduced the percentage of the total budget supported by State tax collections. (Click the chart below to see a chart that shows the trends.) This means that more must be collected from other sources just to keep an even budget - making it difficult to maintain the excellent programs E-VSC is proud to offer our community.
Concerns arise from those who argue that too much money from the budget is spent on administrative costs. That's one argument the recently-completed efficiency and effectiveness study has shown to be untrue of the E-VSC (Click below to see an excerpt from the study).