Creighton presenters walk community through school funding formula, reserves and budget priorities

Vanessa Shapiro, the district finance presenter, opened a community study session on the Creighton Elementary District budget with an overview of how Arizona funds schools and how those rules shape local priorities. “Budgets are pretty dry, especially in Arizona,” Shapiro told the board and the audience before stepping through Average Daily Membership counts, weighted funding for special education and English-language learners, and the district’s fund accounting structure.

Shapiro said Creighton’s funding starts with student counts reported to the Arizona Department of Education and explained the Average Daily Membership system: a student attending 100 of the first 100 days counts as 1 ADM; 50 days counts as 0.5 ADM. She gave the district’s full-year ADM for fiscal 23–24 as “4,580 students and change.”

The presentation described how the state’s funding formula applies weights for preschool, K–8 and special education categories, and that many weights were set in the 1980s. Shapiro noted one recent change: a weight that “used to be 0.09. It is now 0.29.” She said teacher experience index adjustments are set in state statute (citing Arizona Revised Statutes) and that most districts do not exceed the base multiplier of 1.

Shapiro walked the public through the district’s major revenue and spending buckets. For fiscal 23–24 she said the funding calculation produced roughly $32,000,000 for the district and that Creighton’s taxpayers are responsible for about $9,300,000 of that, with the remainder coming from equalization payments from the state (she summarized Creighton’s split as about 27% local, 73% state equalization). She said the state provides a per‑student capital allowance (about $589 per student) that is not sufficient to build schools and that most districts rely on voter‑approved bonds and overrides for construction; Creighton’s next election cycle for overrides is 2026.

Shapiro described the Maintenance & Operations (M&O) fund as the main operating bucket — roughly 83–85% of M&O goes to salaries and benefits — and reviewed uniform account codes the state requires for transparency. She also reviewed other funds the district manages (federal and state grants, student activity funds, tax-credit donations) and warned that federal grants carry high compliance risk: “if you mess up with 1 grant, you then, risk losing all of your federal grants,” she said.

Board members and attendees asked clarifying questions about how the district collects Free and Reduced Lunch applications (Shapiro said community universal meals can reduce application return rates and thus reduce the tiny amount of funding tied to those forms), and about transportation funding (Shapiro said the state only reimburses mileage for students who live more than a mile from school; Creighton nevertheless buses some students who live inside that mile because of safety concerns). The district noted that transportation reimbursement in the funding formula undercounts some of the miles the district actually drives.

Shapiro closed by describing budget calendar timing: the district will propose and adopt next year’s budget in June, continues to publish annual financial reports on the district website, and maintains a fund-balance reserve for risk and unexpected federal funding losses. The district fielded requests for the presentation file to be posted in the BoardDocs materials and agreed to correct which copy is featured on the website.

Why this matters: Creighton’s budget presentation shows the constraints of Arizona’s school funding system — heavy reliance on student counts, set statutory weights for special education and experience, and the need for local overrides or bonds to fund capital needs. The session also made clear tradeoffs the board faces when most of the M&O fund is spent on staff.