BOE hears report on factors that impact WPS budget

During the March 3 BOE meeting, members heard a report about factors that impact the budget, including how school structural repairs are putting pressure on our capital outlay budget, and an explanation of unencumbered cash balances.

The capital outlay budget is around $50 million. It doesn’t just cover facilities maintenance, it also includes district-wide software and hardware, furniture and equipment replacement, fleet vehicles, school safety facilities upgrades and equipment and CTE technology and equipment.  There is a lot of pressure on the capital outlay portion of the budget with our aging infrastructure, for example, more than $40 million has been spent over the last three years on investments in East and North High.

“We can’t spend all our capital outlay budget to fix broken things, and the number of things that could break continues to grow each year. You’ve heard us call that deferred maintenance,” said Chief Financial Officer Addi Lowell.

“Deferred maintenance is not the things that need to be done today, it’s for the things we need to plan on potentially breaking in the future that we will need to fix, and that amount grows every year,” she explained. 

Lowell also clarified a commonly-shared misconception about the district’s cash balances. The district has some cash balances at the end of the fiscal year, but they are mostly in restricted funds and are used to fund long-term obligations and immediate needs. Only 12% of the cash balances are in contingency (“rainy day”) funds, which is 8 – 10 operating days. 

Lowell shared that there are multiple independent outside agencies that audit our budget and all of our spending to make sure our budget is transparent and accurately presented. 

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