Though no action was taken, the Radnor Township Board of School Directors continued to hammer out issues facing the 2011-2012 budget plan at Wednesday's Board of Education meeting.
Timothy Vail, business administrator for the school board, presented a breakdown of where the proposed $76.6 million budget stands for next school year. According to Vail, several issues still need to be addressed by the school board, though significant time was devoted toward what action the board will take when dealing with the current reserve funds in their Public School Employees' Retirement System escrow account.
Board members were split on whether or not additional funds should be allocated to, in essence, what is an approximately $5 million savings account for the school district.
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“We're making such major decisions on razor margins,” said board member Robert Armstrong. “We have to be careful not to extrapolate small numbers on large expenses. At the end of the day, we need to match millage with operating costs.”
The proposed 2011-2012 budget included a 1.4 percent millage rate (property tax) increase. Board members expressed concern that the money in the PSERS account was simply a “mountain of money” not worthwhile to the taxpayers, while others remarked that projected budgets through the 2013 school year would not have enough revenue unless supplemented with the money in that account.
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“This is money today out of taxpayers bank accounts today that we would be asking them to be funding a potential contingency in a fairly small dollar amount,” said board member Susan Michaelson.
Despite mixed reactions from the board members regarding account balances, they agreed on a nearly unanimous decision to transfer $3.2 million from the Capital Reserve Fund and $750,000 from the General Fund (the same account in which the PSERS monies are located) in order to fund a renovation project at Wayne Elementary School. The proposed project, which will total nearly $7.4 million, will include a complete overhaul of the nearly 40-year-old HVAC system and take nearly two years to complete.
Resident Judy Sherry, a familiar name to the Board of School Directors, addressed the board on the grounds of the surplus.
“At the last April Board business meeting, the 2009 audit report showed that an approximately 5.1 million dollar surplus was collected from the taxpayers last year at a time when draconian cuts were claimed to be necessary to school programs and staff,” Sherry said, adding that the current projection of a $2.3 million surplus is indicative of a communication problem.
Sherry attributed the surplus issues as either incompetence or “cynical manipulation” by the board. Sherry's voice of dissent is not new to the board room—she sued the Radnor Township School District in 2008 over an Open Records dispute and the county found in her favor.
Final budget adoption is not scheduled to take place until the next School Board meeting on May 24, 2011, and as board member Greg McNicholas alluded to, there will be time in the coming month for the board to finalize and further understand and solidify where money is coming from and how it will be distributed.
