Maxwell Municipal Schools board approves end-of-year budget adjustments after finance report

The Maxwell Municipal Schools board approved a series of end-of-year budget adjustments following a finance update at the board meeting.

Susan Robinson, a staff member who introduced herself at the start of the meeting, told the board she remained "quite surprised that our NMFA statement has not come in at the 20th of the month," and said the delay — which she attributed to a backlog of reimbursement requests at NMFA — was preventing completion of year-end reports due on the 31st. "So we can't do our year end reports until that bank statement comes in," she said.

Robinson walked members through the budget amendments (referred to in meeting materials as "bars") that staff proposed to align authority with actual receipts and grant balances. She said the first adjustment reflected impact aid (a line she identified as $68 in her report), and subsequent bars moved additional ad valorem receipts into local and debt-service accounts, established a revenue balance in REAP fund 25233 to match grant carryover, budgeted IDEA-B carryover received after the unified application, included IDEA-B preschool funding, and corrected the transportation fund allocation after PED issued revised figures.

The Chair then entertained a motion to approve the consent agenda items, including the budget bars; the motion was moved and seconded and recorded as carried by a 4-0 vote.

Robinson noted that PED's cash-module timing had produced the need to budget some carryover at the start of the fiscal year rather than waiting until June, to ensure budget authority was available as of July 1. She also said some reimbursements remained outstanding but that the bank statements reconciled "with no problems."