By Staff Reports
The Patrick County Board of Supervisors beat a June 30 deadline to adopt its fiscal year 2021-2022 budget at a June 28 meeting.
The total revenues and expenditures balanced at $56,344,192 and the board agreed to appropriate $169,766 more in funds for the school system than originally advertised.
This equates to $5,279,325 in local funds allocated for the schools. While the amount is higher than the $5,109,559 advertised by the county, it still falls short of the approximately $5.5 million requested by the schools.
Clyde DeLoach, vice chairman and of the Blue Ridge District, made the motion to adopt the budget, which passed 4-1 with Jane Fulk, of the Dan River District, voting against it.
Schools Superintendent Dean Gilbert said after the vote that he was “disappointed” that the schools didn’t receive the requested amount.
“We will have to go back and do some refiguring on what we can look at cutting,” Gilbert said. “There were some things in our pre-planned budget that we are going to have to do without.”
Gilbert said the school board will now have to amend its budget at its July 15 meeting.
“I appreciate the extra funding from what we got in fiscal year 2021 but it’s a little disappointing,” Gilbert said. “I appreciate the efforts of the supervisors to come up with some extra however based on my knowledge and based on my experience, we still have calculations that will require a local match. I’ll get to working on it as soon as I get back over to my office.”
The approved amount will still cover the required funding to meet the state’s Standards of Quality (SOQ).
The SOQ funding is calculated based on the number of schools the state deems is needed to serve a locality based on population and other factors. If Patrick County relied on that calculation, it would operate only 3.5 schools.
The rest of the funds are not included in the SOQ but require a local match from the board to receive any accompanying state funds.
At a previous board of supervisors meeting, Gilbert said that without the required local match on the state funds “then the school system could possibly lose the following state funding streams: at-risk money, $921,095; infrastructure and operations money, $679,674; the compensation supplement money, $395,031; k-3 class size reduction money, $297,374; and possibly pre-school education money, $450,795.”
Brandon Simmons, chairman of the Patrick County School Board, also noted in an email that it would equate to a loss of more than $2 million in state funds.
Some other line items in the budget were changed from the originally advertised budget in order for the board of supervisors to include the additional $169,766 for the schools.
First, the county received an additional $246,691 in designated revenues under public assistance/welfare administration. Of that amount, $214,486 went towards an expenditure line item for the Voluntary Placement Agreement under Health and Welfare. This left $32,205 of the additional revenues left over. Then the county reduced its contribution to agencies by $58,705 and it took $78,856 from the contingency fund. The total reductions of $137,561, plus the left over additional revenue of $32,205, was enough to make up the increase for the schools.
Overall, the county is putting $7,257,238 towards the schools out of the general fund. This includes $1,977,913 for school debt service on top of the $5,279,325 in local funding. The rest of the expenditures from the general fund are as follows: $1.76 million for general government administration; $1.2 million for judicial administration; $7.86 million for public safety; $1.6 million for public works; $3.5 million for health and welfare; $260,748 for parks and recreation; $1.38 million for community development; and $1.1 million for non-departmental.
