School Board approves budget incentive program
Stevens Point Area Public School District wants to reward the frugality and efficiency of its school buildings’ staff members, so the School Board approved creating a budget incentive program Monday, March 14.
The Building Budget Savings Incentive Program, which will run on trial basis for the next few years, would establish assigned building funds within the district budget to capture the dollars building staff save annually.
Each year, buildings are allotted a certain dollar amount through the budget process. Building principals submit requests for purchases to administration for approval throughout the year, and at the end of the year savings or overages at each building are recorded. The standard accounting practice in Wisconsin school districts is to put those saved dollars into the district’s general fund balance.
The incentive program would allow school buildings that record savings to have those dollars go into a fund specifically designated to that building within the budget. Those dollars then would accrue annually, and principals could then draw from that specific fund to pay for capital equipment items such as smartboards and computers, said Tom Owens, director of Business Services for the district.
“We don’t currently have the money to do that (fund capital equipment requests),” he said. “If we could find the money through their efforts and they can enjoy the spoils if you will, they might be even more frugal.
“We’re not talking about new money here,” he said. “It’s money we already allocated and if folks can be more efficient and still be able to provide the educational plan they do (for the students), then why shouldn’t they benefit?”
Based on figures presented Monday, Owens said over the past five years, school building staff saved between $25,000 and $50,000 by being financially conscious and creative in efforts to use the funds allotted to them. This school year, for example, building staff took on budgeting the full cost of copies and were told that they would be able to use any savings through the reduction of copies to meet other educational needs in their building.
Efforts for this year will not be known until year’s end when building audits are conducted, but just looking at the past five years, efforts in various buildings translated into savings between $5,000 and $10,000 at each building.
The incentive program is designed so that the specially assigned building funds also would be used to recoup funds if building staff exceeded their annual dollar allotment. So for example, in 2012-2013, a district school overspent its allocated dollars by about $409, according to the table presented by Owens. With this incentive program, that $409 would come out of dollars accrued in the fund.
The incentive program would be established with building savings recorded at the end of this year, Owens said, so the amounts in each building’s assigned fund will vary.
Board members voiced concerns about how to ensure that there would be educational equity across the district schools.
“We have to monitor this very closely so we don’t end up with an inequity because of the particular makeup of a specific school,” Board President Meg Erler said.
Owens said the program could be tweaked once numbers start coming in.
“It’s a slow process,” he said, pointing to the fact that dollars are accumulated over a year’s time, so it could be a few years before figures are available to indicate whether there is inequity. “We have the time to adjust it, shape it if we need to.”