Deficit or surplus projected for BSISD 2020-21 school year

Will the Big Spring ISD face a deficit or surplus at the end of the 202021 school year?

The district’s Chief Financial Officer, Susan Bryan, addressed that topic during a budget workshop at the start of Thursday evening’s school board meeting...and it’s a complicated issue.

“I went into the school year not knowing what was going to happen, but I budgeted based on a normal year – that we would travel, that we have school all year. We just didn’t know, so I went with ‘normal,’” Bryan said.

What the district’s administrators and board were unaware of, however, was the Howard County Appraisal District had been undervaluing local properties – a situation that had the potential to cost the district a lot of money.

E“We got our comptroller values, which is never a good thing, and they came in higher than our appraisal district had done,” Bryan said. “You all know that from (Interim Chief Appraiser Richard) Petree coming in and visiting with you all, and giving you warnings about how he was going to raise property values. We also found out that we, possibly, were going to lose about $3.5 million because there was no grace period. We were going to be held to collections for that even though they didn’t send out appraisals based on that. So last time I visited with you, it looked pretty dire. We were in bad shape.”

Bryan said the district was helped out of that jam by a grant designed to ease transition to a new funding schema in 2020.

“We were due some money due to a Formula Transition Grant,” Bryan said. “It basically said, ‘You should not lose money because we changed the rules, for the next four years. Luckily, we were due some money. We were due about $4.5 million, because House Bill 3 had hurt us so much.”

Bryant said that, while the grant covered the district’s shortfall due to the appraisal situation, it only lasts four years, so the Appraisal District needs to get its appraisals corrected quickly.

“We aren’t as bad off as we thought we were,” she said. “So after all this is said and done, I’m projecting for 2021, a $600,000 surplus.”

Bryant warned that there are still three months remaining in the fiscal year, and the situation could change before then.

Part of the reason for the surplus