School board approves budget

Mentor School District is going to be dealing with lower income and higher expenditures for the next year, according to the district’s newly passed general fund budget.

The district’s 2018-19 appropriations ordinance was approved by the Mentor School Board at its Sept. 25 meeting. Ohio law requires each board of education to pass a temporary appropriations measure by July 1 of each year, so a school district can meet ordinary expenses until an an annual appropriations ordinance is approved by no later than Oct. 1.

Mentor School District’s budget year runs from July through June.

The school district’s budgeted income for 2018-19 is about $103 million, which is $2.8 million less than last year’s actual income of $105.8 million.

Two factors contributing to the projected 2.6 percent decrease in 2018-19 income were events from 2017 in Lake County: higher than certified current property tax collections and an unusually large collection of delinquent property taxes.

One additional source of income in this year’s district budget

is one-half year revenue of $156,000 from the new Lake Health Wellness Campus in Mentor.

Meanwhile, the district’s 2018-19 general fund budget expenses total about $101.1 million. That represents an increase of 5.75 percent, or $5.5 million, from last year’s actual expenditures of $95.6 million.

Health care costs are playing a significant role in driving up expenditures.

In most recent years, Mentor Schools has had a zero percent increase in employee health insurance costs, Chief Financial Officer Daniel Wilson said. But for 2018-19, Wilson decided to figure in an increase in that spending category.

“I can’t in good faith budget that in January, we’re going to get another zero percent increase,” he said during the Sept. 25 meeting. “I used the medical inflation rate for the Great Lakes region, which is 8 percent.”

The budgeted 8 percent increase for health insurance, effective Jan 1, increased the district’s budget by $468,301, Wilson said.

Another additional expenditure in the new budget is $120,000 for hiring two additional school resource officers. This year’s budget also will fund the purchase of five new school buses, rather than the four buses typically purchased annually in the past.

“Based on an updated analysis and some new benchmarking data on the useful life of school buses, particularly in our situation in Northeast Ohio with a lot of road salt in the winter, we had been budgeting for four replacement buses every year, but we’ve now upped it to five,” Wilson said.

Overall, the Mentor School District’s general fund budget shows a projected surplus of $1.9 million.

“We are not deficit spending, which is a good indicator,” Wilson said.

Meanwhile, the district’s 2018-19 general fund budget expenses total about $101.1 million. That represents an increase of 5.75 percent, or $5.5 million, from last year’s actual expenditures of $95.6 million.