On Jan. 15, the Salisbury Township School District Board operations committee held its monthly meeting. The primary objective for this meeting was to go over the proposed preliminary budget for the 2020-2021 school year.

Chief Financial Officer and Board Secretary Michael Taylor provided a detailed presentation on the goals the district will be striving to attain in order to achieve a balanced budget in the coming months. Taylor noted in 2019 the board began implementing a five-year forecast model. This would allow the board to take into consideration trends in spending, costs and inflation to more effectively predict where the numbers in the budget would fall.

With this new model in view, it would also allow the budget to use the past five years to shape projections of where the next five would go.

Taylor’s presentation included several expenditure considerations causing the budget to be in a state of flux. First, salary adjustments will come in to play this school year, as agreements for support personnel, head cooks and confidential secretaries are all expiring. The focus throughout the presentation, however, remained on rising special education costs, as well as the cost of district students opting for charter schools, whether it be brick and mortar locations or cyber charter options. Transportation costs and benefits for school district staff were also noted as considerations.

The committee took some time to examine the chief reasons for rising expenses. In the special education sphere, intermediate unit costs continue to trend upwards, and there is a continuing need to acquire additional instructional assistants for classrooms.

In the realm of charter schools, the committee spoke about plans in place to be more proactive in convincing students from the district to remain in Salisbury schools. Marketing the benefits and positive results of an education through the Salisbury Township School District would become more of a priority, in addition to several measures already in place, such as mailings that go out to charter-enrolled students who live in the district encouraging them to re-enroll, were mentioned as methods to combat the loss of students to these alternative options.

After the presentation, Director Joseph Gnall remarked the board tends to set the budget and then forget about it until the time comes to plan for the next one. He inquired about implementing measures to track the budget more closely through the course of the year. The rest of the committee was in agreeance to using current systems and new protocols to allow the committee to be more attentive to financial progress in an effort to be more fiscally responsible to the community. One idea Gnall introduced was forming a finance committee, which is to be discussed at an upcoming meeting.

The preliminary budget presented at this meeting will face review at the full school board meeting Jan. 22, with a deadline to adopt it Jan. 29. The final budget has a deadline to adopt by June 17.