The Manhasset School District will receive approximately $425,000 more in revenues in the 2013-14 school year than previously anticipated, officials said on Tuesday.
Rosemary Johnson, the district’s assistant superintendent for business, said the bump was due primarily to unanticipated revenues for health services Manhasset provides students living outside the district who are taking classes in the district, state aid for its intermediate care facility and aid for the district’s Parent Child Home program and students classified by the state as homeless.
“Homeless is very hard to predict in terms of the reimbursements we’re going to get,” Johnson said.
The district had previously anticipated $86,176,419 in revenue, transfers and the tax levy, but now projects $86,601,619 for the end of the 2013-14 fiscal year, Johnson said.
Johnson said that even though the district had anticipated $1,125,000 in expenditures at the end of February, and is still on track to meet its budget expenditures total from 2013-14, there were unanticipated expenses that bumped its expenditures up to $1,202,086.
The district’s special education budget, she said, is “built on a child-by-child basis.”
“There are so many things that happen to our people and to our families and to our kids,” she said. “It’s always changing.”
As of May 31, the district had spent $72,328,756 of the $86,176,419 it had budgeted for in 2013-14. The district anticipates that it will spend $12,645,577 more.
Johnson said the district put $368,660 of its excess fund balance toward textbooks, materials, supplies and staff development in Manhasset’s elementary reading and writing program to align more closely with the Common Core curriculum and $69,479 for materials toward its Common Core elementary Math in Focus program from kindergarten through fourth grade.
She said the district should anticipate a $70,000 expenditure in each of the next two years to align its fifth and sixth-grade Math in Focus curriculum with the rest of the program.
Johnson said the district has projected $19,934,872 in projected expenses toward retirement benefits for 2013-14, with $672,451 in expenses.
She said its actual expenses have increased by $5,662,421 since the 2009-10 school year, an increase of 39.67 percent.
“That means every dollar and more, every dollar and more, of budget increase went to benefits, and that’s with the benefit of the pension stabilization program we implemented for this year,” she said.
