Park County School District 1 is planning to spend nearly a million dollars more this year than last, in part to cut reserve funds before the state requires the district to reduce the amount it can hold in reserves by half.

The school board approved the fiscal year 2023-2024 budget during its July 19 meeting.

After enjoying an increased allowable amount for reserve funds during the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell and all other districts in the state must prepare to reduce their reserve funds to a maximum of 15%, as it was pre-Covid, by June 30, 2026. 

Business Services Coordinator Mary Jo Lewis said that when school districts received Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding the allowable reserve amount was increased from 15% to 30% but it is now set to come back down in two years.

During the PCSD1 budget hearing in July, Superintendent Jay Curtis said that some of the expenditures in the budget are being used to spend down the district’s reserve funds.

He added that changes to this year’s budget were one of two things: Moved, changed or added staff and additional changes to expenses like utilities, which Curtis said are increasing this year. 

“Obviously, we're hopeful to get legislation enacted that just makes that permanent, to have that allowance to have that kind of carryover, because if you took our carryover right now, we're not at 30%,” Lewis said. “Good operating practice is that you have three months of reserves of operating reserves, and if you took our budget, divided it by 12 and then multiply that by three, we should actually carry about $7.6 million in reserves, which would be over 15%.”

This year’s total budgeted revenues for the district are $28,766,215, while last year’s total revenues were $28,584,209. This year's expected expenditures are $30,586,250, compared to last year’s budgeted expenditures of $29,719,510.

“Sometimes we take it for granted how nice it is to have a budget that we can live within and live very comfortably within,” said vice chairman Trace Paul. 

In a budget explanation submitted to the board Lewis said that the district expended 97.5% of its budget last year.

This year’s mill levies received by the school district are as follows: 25 mills for the district tax and six mills for the county tax, as required by law. According to the budget the school district will have $9,597,575 from local resources and $3,490,115 from county resources. The school district also voted to approve 1 mill for the recreation district and .5 mill for the Powell Valley Community Education.

Despite hiccups with the Wyoming Department of Eduction (WDE) 100, the state’s funding model for schools, Lewis was able to get a budget formed in time for the July meeting.

Jay Curtis explained to the school board during the July 19 budget meeting that they had to pass a budget that night. 

The WDE 100 was thrown off earlier this year due to new legislation regarding charter school funding. Lewis explained that when components of the model are changed a consultant has to recertify it. However, altering the model “broke other links in the model.” 

“It wasn't working properly and providing the proper funding to districts,” Lewis said. “So it was very, very late getting any kind of budgeting model to us and it's still not finalized.”

The district is not expected to have to amend the budget when the model is fixed because the school district has the budgeted amount available and its expenditures are never “100% fully expended,” according to the budget explanation. In the explanation it was also mentioned the district only expended 97.5% of its budget last year.

“We have significant cash in the bank, in our cash reserves. So it doesn't require us to do that,” Lewis said. 

The entire budget can be viewed by the public at pcsd1.org.