No cuts for the first time in three years for Morgan Hill School
District
For the first time since 2002, the Morgan Hill School District will not have to make cuts to its general fund budget and could be able to reinstate some positions it was forced to cut during three years of million-dollar deficits.
“The news for us is so much better than it has been in the past,” Deputy Superintendent Bonnie Tognazzini said Friday.
The district’s general fund operating budget for this year is $57 million.
School Board trustees voted unanimously to adopt this interim budget report at their meeting Tuesday night.
“This is your real budget,” Tognazzini told trustees during the meeting. “When you approved the budget for this year in June, we didn’t have the actuals, and the budget did not include the teachers’ raise.”
The adopted budget included Average Daily Attendance, or ADA, funds for 8,766.79 students, while this first interim report adjusted the figure to 8,921.44. With approximately 160 more students, the general fund increases by approximately $350,000, as the state pays the district about $5,000 per student.
The board will take another look at the budget in March. The purposes of these reports, Tognazzini said, is to give a review of the district’s financial position at different times during the year, to provide a status report to trustees and to the public and to ascertain necessary revisions to the budget because of current or projected information.
Tognazzini told trustees Tuesday that based on this report, the district would have more than $500,000 in unappropriated funds in this year’s budget.
“A lot of custodians are still missing, groundskeepers, and some of these resources could be used right now for reinstatement purposes,” she said Friday.
Superintendent Alan Nishino has commented publicly since he was hired in June on the meager staffing at the District office and on the skeleton crew of custodians and groundskeepers supporting the district.
“We’re bringing back three custodians and a groundsperson,” Nishino said Friday. “We were really at a level that was below just a basic functioning level. It’s a priority for us to bring these people back.”
Nearly $9 million was cut from the district’s budget over three years. Diminishing state funding, as well as falling ADA contributed to the deficits. District ADA for this year is up, as well as total enrollment.
