BROKEN BOW—The budget and tax levy has been approved for the 2018-2019 fiscal year for Broken Bow Public Schools in a unanimous vote. The Broken Bow School Board met on Monday, September 17 for their regular meeting that took much less time than the previous weeks work session.
In the work session, the board had discussed the budget and tax levy in length with the possibility of decreasing the schools asking in tax requests. The consensus at the work session was asking for less from the previous years to thank the community and help decrease some of the burden on tax payers.
The reduction would be additional to the already reduced amount after the valuation of everyone’s property went up. In the end, the board did decide to reduce their tax request, at the regular board meeting, by an additional 2 cents (1 cent=$100,000). The proposed property tax request for this coming year, for the general fund, would be $8,173,737.29, which is around $200,000 less than last year’s request.
The board also approved the budget for the year which was kept the same as last year at $10,990,000. The expenses for the school this last year were in the neighborhood of $10.6 million and the board expected the same to be said for the upcoming year.
This $300,000+ dollar gap gives the school some cushion in the event a disaster would happen at the school. Also, in the past two years the school has been lucky enough to have had more revenue generated thus also creating an additional $400,000 in available funds.
Comments from staff on other subjects included the thanking of the community in their support of the 6th Grade elections and Superintendent Darren Toby commending the staff on doing a fantastic job on the first teacher in-service. There was also “thank you” from the public on a job well done on the transparency on the entire budget process.
The next Work Session will be on Monday, October 1 at 7:30 P.M. and the next School Board Meeting will be October 15 at 7:30 P.M.
