By Marcia Barnes
Staff Writer
At a called meeting on Tuesday, April 4 the Clay County Board of Education unanimously approved the 2023/2024 local budget request for Hayesville schools. The request will now be sent to the Clay County Commissioners.
Chief Finance Officer Shelley Hollingsworth gave a first read of the local budget request on Monday, March 27 at the regularly scheduled board meeting.
Board member Kelly Crawford asked for a clarification regarding the school’s unrestricted fund balance. The question was addressed by both Hollingsworth and Superintendent Dale Cole.
Cole said, “$42,669 is what we can pull from to pay for something that happens out of the blue. That’s what we have.”
Clay County Schools is requesting $1,979,199 for the local current expense fund. Cole said, “I want to be clear again that we prioritized the list of what we asked for. The biggest thing is just short of $78,000 to make up the difference in electrical and heating fuel costs. Part of that is when we opened the new primary school, again, we had no idea how much it was going to cost utility-wise, so we just put a $50,000 estimate out there to have something to start with and the commissioners funded that, but it ended up being more than that. On top of that we had inflation and rising costs.”
The proposed budget requests $11,000 for a salary match for the new School Resource Officer at the primary school. There is a request for an eight percent projected increase in salary for locally funded positions at the Hayesville schools. Cole said, “The governor’s proposed plan would call for 10 percent next year. The House has come in at, I think, seven percent. Now we’ll see what the Senate comes up with.”
Clay County Schools proposes an eight percent increase. “For the county that would be $29,287. If all of our state funded positions get that raise, then we want all our locally funded positions to get that raise. We just think that’s fair,” Cole said.
“Then, we would like for the county to pay for all of the ninth graders to get a new Chromebook each year because Chromebooks last for five years and will take them all the way through high school. It has one year left. We think it just makes sense to let them keep them. We take care of kindergarten through eighth with our state funds.”
The annual ninth grade Chromebook distribution accounts for $44,298 of the budget. Cole said, “We’d like to ask the county to provide all of the classified staff, custodians, child nutrition workers, maintenance positions, all classified positions to receive a $500 flat local supplement each year. That would cost the county $47,574. We think all of those are critical to our continued operations.”
Chairman Jason Shook said, “We want to keep these people.”
The next regular board meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Monday, April 24.
-
By Marcia Barnes Staff Writer At a called meeting on Tuesday, April 4 the Clay County Board of Education unanimously approved the 2023/2024 local budget request for Hayesville schools. The request will now be sent to the Clay County Commissioners. Chief Finance Officer Shelley Hollingsworth gave a first read of the local budget request on Monday, March 27 at the regularly scheduled board meeting. Board member Kelly Crawford asked for a clarification regarding the school’s unrestricted fund balance. The