Budget proposal for schools given

During the April 7 meeting of the Alleghany County Board of Education, members were presented with a current expense budget proposal for the 2009-2010 fiscal year.

The grand total of proposed expenditures is $3,351,482, compared to the 2008-09 fiscal year adopted budget of $2,931,599, which reflects a proposed increase of $419,883.

Superintendent Jeff Cox explained, "We go through a process and we have a committee that includes two board members and a number of our central office staff."

Requests made by teachers are filtered through school improvement teams, with help with the leadership of the school principals. From there, the schools and the departments in the central office bring proposals to the finance committee, which mulls them over as they compare the previous year's budget to the requests.

This year, the county commission is anticipating receiving the board's budget by April 15 or 16, according to Cox.

Cox commented, "We know this is a tough budget year for the county, for the state, for the nation. We really scrutinized everything to try to avoid any appearance of including anything other than what we really thought was high priority."

Cox then made note of three items in the proposed budget he was of the opinion needed to be addressed as the board members began to look over the proposal.

The first was two replacement positions. The current budget denotes a cost of $40,000 and an increase of $42,400 for the proposed budget item total of $82,400.

"We have gotten our initial planning allotment from the state which they give us about this time of year…that suggests that our budget would be for next year if everything else would be for next year if everything else was equal," stated Cox. "In other words, it doesn't take into account any budget cuts. It is based on our enrollment and the state formulas and so forth. We would be anticipating losing two teacher positions before we get into budget cuts. The second item we'd have to include in the local budget are those two positions. In other words, we wouldn't have to immediately be looking at having two fewer teacher positions next year before we even get into budget considerations."