By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
School in Great Bend officially began Aug. 18. And now the school year is funded. Monday night, the USD 428 Board of Education held its Revenue Neutral Rate and standard budget hearing, voting 7-0 on the passage of both. With increased property valuation across the district, and an increase in mill levy from 41.124 last year to 41.84 this year, the 2022-23 budget is listed just beyond $67 million.
"The way our budget works is that, in order for you to have access to the full amount of dollars you have, you have to show that you spent them all," said USD 428 Superintendent Khris Thexton. "It doesn't mean that we will, it just says you have to have the budget authority to do so."
The district still gets a nice bump with the third year of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency (ESSER) federal funds first issued two years ago to address pandemic-related situations. In June, the board voted to use some of those dollars for staff retention. The district is halfway through the four-year program, and Thexton emphasized the desire to use those dollars but not get too dependent.
"That's a significant amount of funding we've had added to our system," he said. "That's one of those, you're trying to be responsive with the funding because you know it's short-term money, so you want to be able to infuse that money to help offset that learning loss we've had for the few years we've been dealing with. And we want to be able to make sure we're not coming to a point where there's that cliff where, all of a sudden in September 2024, that is gone."
The budget shows administrative incomes in the district at an average salary of $105,086, increasing to $111,025 for the 2022-23 school year. Full-time teachers are up to an average salary of $58,377 this year, up from $45,479 two years ago. ESSER dollars were used for a one-time retention check earlier this year, and the board also announced at the time that starting pay for new teachers would increase to $42,200 a year.
Prior to the standard budget meeting, the district held its mandatory Revenue Neutral Rate meeting. With increased property valuations from a year earlier, the district would have needed to drop from 41.124 mills in 2021-22 to 40.192 mills in 2022-23 to remain revenue neutral. With a maximum eight mills levied for capital outlay, an increase from 6.492 the year before, the district will exceed the revenue neutral rate by 1.648 mills.