School district seeks county approval for multiple budget amendments, including SPED records digitization and summer-school funds

The school district asked the Coffee County Budget & Finance committee in May to approve seven budget amendments that would add state grant funds, start a project to digitize permanent special-education records and bring a recurring summer-school grant into the district budget.

The request covers multiple amendments (identified in the packet by numbers including 141202513, 141202514, 141202516 and others) that officials said clean up grant budget lines, add newly awarded state grants and appropriate current-year revenues for instructional uses. The school representative said the adjustments “do not affect fund balance” in most cases and described one item as required because of state grant reporting and accounting rules.

The amendments include: moving and clarifying salary and benefits lines in two state grants (innovative school models and the state preschool grant); a SPED records digitization project (filed as an amendment so funding is added to a line not in the original budget); additional compensation for the IT director to cover extra hours for recording and posting meetings (identified as IT director Randy Danewood); a literacy grant for academic coaches; a summer-school grant for K–8 that officials said fully funds transportation, teachers and aides and “will not pay anything out of our general school budget”; and use of about $290,000 in test-score revenue for elementary ELA workbooks, CTE student certifications, NIET support, ACT mastery prep and teacher training.

The school representative said the SPED digitization project was needed because “we have to keep SPED records forever” and the district’s storage room is full; the IT director’s overtime pay is an estimate based on current hours and will be paid at year-end, the representative said.

Officials also presented a package of athletic-field and track improvements that will draw on restricted funds. The representative said those amendments “do affect fund balance” but only the assigned/restricted portion: the amendment reduces the assigned restricted fund balance by $69,000 to a stated figure of 8.3 (the district’s unassigned fund balance remains at 12.3 per the packet summary).

Commissioners discussed a few details and asked who supervised certain projects; the school representative identified Randy Danewood as the relevant supervisor for IT work. Commissioner Stubblefield moved to approve amendments numbered 13 through 20; Commissioner Hirschman seconded the motion. The committee voted by voice; the clerk recorded “Aye,” and the packet indicates the amendments were approved.

The district will process the changes now that the committee approved the package; state-approved grant items will be recorded and staff will implement the digitization, literacy and instructional purchases described in the amendments.