DCSD Board approves $89 million dollar budget
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
The Darlington County Board of Education gave the final reading of the 2018-2019 budget during their June 11 meeting, passing it with little fanfare. The board has held several workshops over the last few months to go over the specifics of the budget with Chief Financial Officer Renee Douglas. The approved budget is $89.5 million for this coming year. The approval was unanimous with two board members, Jamie Morphis and Wanda Hassler, not present for the vote.
Though the budget was approved, Douglas said that there is still a chance that changes will need to be made based on the fact that the South Carolina General Assembly has not passed their own budget yet.
“We have used the Senate version of the budget, right now,” Douglas said. “Until we know anything else that is really our best guess.”
DCSD Superintendent Tim Newman, attending his first meeting in his official capacity, said that many districts are relying on the Senate version of the budget to craft their own budgets because it years past it has tended to be closest to the final budget that gets approved by state lawmakers in the General Assembly.
This coming school year, $275,000 will be used from the district’s general fund balance to implement block scheduling at the district’s three high schools.
“We’ll have to figure out a way in the future to incorporate that into the regular budget,” Douglas said. “That was to get the block scheduling started.”
Board member Warren Jeffords questioned whether the district planned to use savings from school operation budgets after six schools were consolidated into three in new school buildings in Lamar, Hartsville and Darlington.
“Do we feel like we can save enough from this school consolidation to make up for that,” Jeffords asked.
Newman said that he and other district staff feel comfortable with using fund balance money this one time, knowing that other funds will be freed up in the consolidation.
“We feel very comfortable that by this time next year we’ll find a way to absorb that into the budget,” Newman said.
“Both Ms. Douglas and myself being new to the process, you know where we were (in estimated block scheduling expenses) in the first work session and how much we were able to work through. We were able to whittle it down to where we are now so it has been a lot of steady work by the finance department.”
When the subject was first discussed in a board work session, the estimate to implement block scheduling was over two million dollars. Newsman said that he worked with district and school staff to find a bare bones base number that would allow the scheduling change to start now rather than be pushed off another year.
The budget does include a millage increase of 3.75 on property taxes. The district was capped at increasing by 2.13 percent based on the Consumer Price Index.
Also included in the budget are step increases for teacher pay and a one-percent pay increase for all employees. Teachers will receive both the one-percent increase and the step increase.