Bowling Green Independent School District’s annual draft budget predicts net surpluses next school year of $1.2 million for the General Fund and about $276,500 in food service.

The BGISD Board of Education approved the draft budget Monday. It precedes an April tentative budget, a guiding document enabling BGISD to prepare for the next year. The September working budget shows revenues and expenses for the school year in which it’s published.

While some factors are unpredictable this early, BGISD Director of Finance Shaunna Cornwell gauged the $1.2 million as a comfortable amount to cover changes in 2025-26 school year costs while responding to inflation and growing enrollment, both of which may fluctuate.

This draft budget accounts for a key factor that last year’s didn’t: When BGISD published the 2024-25 draft budget, Kentucky’s General Assembly hadn’t yet passed its budget bill, which confirms the base amount for school districts’ foundational funding program, Support Education Excellence in Kentucky (SEEK). This time — with the state legislature in the second year of its biennial budget — BGISD has been able to account for that budgetary factor.

The $1.2 million General Fund surplus resulted from an increase in this SEEK funding, which Cornwell predicts to be about 6%, from $4,326 to $4,586, for a total of around $3 million more in SEEK next year.

Still, areas of concern and other moving parts remain difficult or impossible to currently account for.

“There are so many more things that are variable that could put us in a positive-impact situation or negative-impact situation,” she said. “I feel good with (the General Fund’s $1.2 million net surplus), but (there’s no certainty) about what April’s going to look like as we start really tightening up and figuring out the budget.”

The $1.2 million is also not enough to give her confidence the district can meet its priority of substantially bolstering staff salaries, she added.

“We’re always looking for a way to try and raise that bar to give them sustainable salaries and salaries (that are) enough to recruit people into the field,” Cornwell said. “It’s hard to keep that pipeline full anymore. Education just seems to be losing its pipeline of new teachers. So, that’s really important, and that is one of our most important goals.”

A 1% raise would cost the district $430,000, Cornwell said. So, based on the budget and current legislative funding, the district would be extremely hard pressed to offer a 2% districtwide raise when accounting all variables in the current economic environment, according to Cornwell.

Factors, areas of concern

It’s a tight budget. Because it’s difficult to impossible to accurately account for the two main areas of budgetary concern next year — inflation and growth — the General Fund’s $1.2 million surplus may need to go a long way.

Cornwell expects a more accurate prediction of inflation when the district prepares its tentative budget. The 2024 Consumer Price Index lists inflation at 2.9%; for the time being, Cornwell is considering a very general prediction of a 2.5% to 5% inflation.

“Everywhere we turn, everything costs more,” Cornwell said — from buses, to fuel, to utilities, to instructional supplies, to core curriculum for math and English, and so on.

A key factor that makes inflation difficult to predict is that it varies greatly by expenditure; for example, the school district has found that inflation for food costs is 16%, according to BGISD Director of Operations Dalla Emerson.

And, while BGISD’s draft budget accounts for a 7% growth of its average daily attendance, from 4,201 students to 4,495, the figure may continue to change, and likely grow, between now and next school year. With that will come changes in expenditures, staffing at the forefront, Cornwell said.

Another factor that could fluctuate is state pensions. The Kentucky Public Pensions Authority board decreased the County Employees Retirement System rate 1.09 percentage points to 18.62% — which would save BGISD $50,000-$64,000 and some $14,000 in food service, according to the draft budget. But still, the budget adds, there’s the possibility pensions can increase up to 12%.

Per-pupil spending

BGISD also contextualized a data point on per-pupil spending used in the Jan. 5 Daily News column, “Taxpayers should expect more from public schools,” by Western Kentucky University Professor Gary Houchens, a local advocate for publicly funded non-traditional school choice options.

Houchens’ column draws on Kentucky School Report Card data to state that BGISD spends “a whopping $21,247 per student, nearly as much as the state’s largest district, the Jefferson County Schools.

So where does all that money go?” Houchens wrote.

Cornwell detailed per-pupil spending at the meeting.

“That number is reported on our school report card, but it encompasses everything — so, in a year that you spend $20 million in construction, that is going to blow up that number to an unreasonable degree,” she said. “That is absolutely no reflection of what our per-pupil spending is in terms of educating the kids.

So, you really have to understand where those numbers are coming from, and what’s included in that number, before we really talk about that per-pupil spending.”

A district breakdown based on the draft budget shows the total per-pupil 2025-26 funding is expected to be $16,002.75. Among that, $8,804 comes from the General Fund; within that, $4,731.82 is budgeted for general instruction, $522.40 for supplementary instructional supports such as speech pathologists and mental health counselors, and $571.49 for instructional assistance such as teacher training — for a total of $5,825.71 in General Fund monies planned for instruction.

The other General Fund categories are administrative district support, administrative school support, business support services, student transportation, food service operations and plant operations & maintenance.

“These funds directly impact the students — direct instruction, food for them, the facilities they’re in …,” Cornwell said about the General Fund. “Out of (the draft budget total of $16,002.75 per pupil), that’s really the only part of the budget we really have discretion over.”

The draft budget allots $1,435.23 per student in restricted grant funding, the vast majority going toward instructional supports such as “Title I, Part A” federal funding, which provides academic supports for students at schools where the percentage of children from low-income families meets a certain threshold.

Legislatively restricted funds per pupil — the building fund, capital outlay, debt service and food service operations — make up $3,329.23 per student. And on-behalf expenditures, such as health insurance and employers’ retirement contributions, are estimated at $2,433.84 per pupil.

“We just have to be careful — all sides, we throw out numbers, they’re good for the headlines (to) try to make a point, but we’ve got to just make sure they’re accurate,” BGISD Superintendent Gary Fields told the Daily News. “I think, when you throw out those big numbers, that makes people think that we may not be good stewards of the public funds, and I would argue that our Board of Education are very good stewards of our public funds, and we want to be transparent about that.”