Lamar County teachers will regain $100 that was lost from their local supplement and each administrator will get back a lost day of pay, according to the fiscal year 2019 proposed budget that was presented recently.
Superintendent Tess Smith said a sudden change to the current year’s budget – which ends on June 30 – led to some cutbacks.
“One thing I am thankful for (in the FY19 budget) is we are able to restore the wages,” she told the School Board members. “At the last minute, we realized that we had lost our high-growth funding. It was a scramble to come up with enough money to offset. Teachers lost $100 of their supplement, administrators lost a day of pay, and the business office worked incredibly hard this year go make sure that we found that funding to get everyone back whole again.”
With the voluntary consolidation of the Lamar County and Lumberton schools – which begins July 1 – the school district will include 19 schools and an estimated enrollment of 10,767; 159 buses will run on 172 routes daily and; there will be 1,600 total employees. The Lumberton enrollment is estimated at 600.
Smith said the process of adding the Lumberton schools to the Lamar County School District has been working.
“The transition is going incredibly well,” she said. “Mr. (Bryan) Giles (consolidation coordinator and new Lumberton High School principal) and Ms. (Sharon) Cooley (new Lumberton Elementary School principal) were in the building today doing some interviews and getting things ready. I could not have anticipated a smoother transition. Everything that we say publicly, we are also saying privately.”
School District Business Manager Jennifer Hession went through the numbers involved in the budget with School Board members. She explained the school district’s fiscal year doesn’t coincide with the Lamar County fiscal year, which causes some funding issues.
“The school district fiscal year is July 1-June 30,” she said. “The county is Oct. 1-Sept. 30. That difference in time, three months, we have to basically fund everything with our fund balance or what we have from the federal and state funds. We have very little funds that come in from the county during that time.
“January is the first month when we get our really big tax payments, so it is about half a year that we have about half of our fiscal year without the tax money. That’s why it’s very important to have an ending fund balance.”
Another important point is the fact how funds are requested from the county, Hession said.
“We request dollars, not mills,” she said. “We will make a request by Aug. 15 to the Board of Supervisors so they can include that in its budget.”
The budget will be presented for adoption at the regularly scheduled meeting at 6 p.m. July 19 at the Lamar County School District offices, 424 Martin Luther King Drive, Purvis.
