After years of being underfunded, Warren Township High School District 121 will not be operating in a deficit for the upcoming year, after the district’s Board of Education approved its budget for the 2024 fiscal year.
The fiscal year began on July 1, and will run through June 30, 2024.
The spending plan is the first annual budget adopted since district residents passed a referendum last year.
While the referendum passed in 2022, the district didn’t receive any additional funding until May 2023. The approved referendum increased taxes by $16.67 a month, or $200 a year, for every $100,000 of a home’s fair market value.
Now that the referendum has passed, the district’s fund balance increased by more than $15 million compared to last year’s.
The district’s revenue is estimated to be $97 million, with $77.5 million of that coming from local sources like property taxes, impact fees and student fees, according to Christine Green, the district’s assistant superintendent of business services and operations.
On the other hand, the district’s expenditures are $90.5 million, which grew from last year’s $73.9 million in budgeted expenditures. But, the district will not be operating in a deficit, as it previously had for several years.
Green added that she budgeted the district’s expenditures higher, so they might turn out to be lower than what she included.
“I am aggressive with expenditures,” she said. “I budget higher just to account for any possibility.”
Due to the increase in funding, District 121 was able to hire 28 new teachers and staff members this year, and salaries make up a majority of the district’s expenditures, at $43.68 million.
The hiring of new staff members and teachers is one of the biggest reasons for the increased expenditures, as staffing contracts and benefit expenditures both grew over the past year, with benefits costing the district $2.3 million more than in the previous fiscal year.
Part of the benefit increases included insurance plans for teachers and staff members, as almost every insurance plan, besides life insurance, saw increased costs.
One of the biggest projects that the district included in the new budget is replacing the roof on Warren’s O’Plaine campus. The district is including $6.1 million in its capital outlay budget, which is a $5.1 million increase over last year’s budget.
The capital outlay budget would cover items like the roof replacement project, as well as security updates, according to Green.
The district is also setting aside $1.9 million to help fund any maintenance projects that may develop throughout the year, she said.
“We have HVAC systems that are failing, so this is budgeted for companies that would be coming in and doing service for us,” Green said.
The district said that budgeting for deferred maintenance projects and the increased staffing were some of its main priorities this year.
“We approved a budget this year that prioritizes three things, Superintendent Daniel Woestman said. “We’re increasing services to students. We’ve got increased salary and benefits. We have deferred maintenance that we’re starting to budget for. We have a big roof project that we’ve allocated money for.”
