The Sioux Falls School District is building its $350 million budget plan for the upcoming year.
This years’ proposed budget represents a $13 million boost year-over-year, though expenditures are up for the district too.
Superintendent Jane Stavem said a lot goes into your local district’s budget.
“To make everything that we fund work, we’re heavily reliant on people. We’re not reliant on robots and machines – we show up every day to do this work," Stavem said. "So, I just think it bears thinking about complexity as we enter into this. It’s a very large budget, and a very large system.”
District business manager Todd Vik broke down the proposals three options: funding at 100 percent of current year, funding with a 2 percent dip, and funding with a 4 percent dip.
“We try to target out five years when we budget," Vik said. "We know with the ESSER funds going away at the end of this year we’re trying to pick up about between eight- and ten-million dollars that were added – ongoing expenditures – that were added during ESSER. We know there’s going to be a dip in that. We’re projecting at the end of this year we’re going to have a 10.8 percent fund balance.”
ESSER is the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. This budget is only a proposal, and no final action has been taken.
“So, those 19 committees with over 100 individuals working on them prepared many, many budgets we’re going to try to go through here," Vik said. "We’ll try to move this along, we have a second session next week so if you think about this and come up with questions – get the right people here to answer those if the right people aren’t here today.”
The next budget hearing is slated for April 3.