Kalispell school board considers $48.4 million budget

The Daily Inter Lake

Kalispell school board members are scheduled to finalize the upcoming school year's $48.4 million budget at their regular meeting tonight.

The board will decide whether to approve budgets for Flathead County's largest elementary and high school districts. Kalispell's elementary budget is about $21.5 million; the high school district's budget is almost $26.9 million.

Both budgets are larger than last year's; the elementary district budget increased by about 2.8 percent, and the high school budget grew by about 0.7 percent.

The bigger budgets are largely the result of increasing enrollment throughout the district. Kalispell's elementary enrollment last fall was up about 4 percent from the previous year and up about 2 percent in the high school district.

It is the only K-12 district in the county with increasing enrollment. Bigfork, Columbia Falls and Whitefish all lost students last year.

Enrollment is one of the major factors in determining a district's budget; schools receive per-student funding from the state.

Kalispell's 2009-2010 general-fund budget also includes federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The act gave Flathead County schools about $6 million in special-services funds; the one-time-only money is intended for use in districts' special education and Title I programs.

Because districts will only receive the funds once, there is some danger of creating a "funding cliff" if school officials opt to use the money to hire new positions. Districts that do use stimulus money to hire staff must be prepared to find new ways to fund those positions or lay off staff members when the stimulus money is gone.

Kalispell Public Schools received almost $2.3 million in stimulus money and will use some of it to fund new positions, including a half-time speech pathologist, a preschool special-education teacher and two high school resource teachers.

The jobs were advertised as one-year positions because of the funding uncertainty. But the district opted to use some of its stimulus funds for new jobs to avoid asking taxpayers for additional support.

A voted levy may be necessary in spring 2010.

This fall, voters may be asked to approve a building-reserve levy. Building-reserve funds are separate from the district's general-fund budget and are used for building and construction projects, including remodels and repairs.

The board will discuss the building-reserve levy at tonight's meeting but will not vote on it.

The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the Kalispell Middle School library meeting center. A full agenda is available at www.sd5.k12.mt.us/brd/agenda/agenda.htm.