Cape schools tout rosy financial outlook

The Cape Girardeau School District started the new fiscal year Thursday and officials say the 4,200-pupil district is enjoying its strongest financial position in several years.

Reserves in the general fund and special revenue funds today are nearly double what they were seven years ago as the district carries a $12.4 million fund balance into FY 2022.

The district's improved finances allowed the Board of Education to approve June 28 an average across-the-board 5% pay hike to approximately 650 qualified full-time employees.

Nearly 450 of those employees are teachers and superintendent Neil Glass took pains to point out the importance of those educators.

"Everybody's on board because we know at the end of the day we want to improve our position on teacher salaries," he said. "Teachers have the biggest impact on our students, and that's where we want to put our emphasis."

Fiscal improvement

"We use as a kind of a (financial) low-water benchmark the 2014-2015 year," Glass said. "We had roughly 12% fund balances back then and now we're at 23%. The doubling we've seen in less than 10 years is quite a feat (and) it's taken a true village to get there. Teachers are looking out for the budget as are administrators and the folks at Central Office."

Drilling down

Lindsey Dudek, the district's chief financial officer, said fund balances function as a reserve to help carry the district through the next fiscal year.

"What was happening [in 2014-2015] is we didn't have enough reserve to help us cash-flow through January until we got our tax money — so we were doing tax anticipation notes and we were borrowing against the receipts that we were going to get later," Dudek said.

"Not having to take out a tax anticipation note in FY 2022 saves (the district) interest (and) we were borrowing in the past anywhere from $6 million to $8 million," Glass said. "The interest we were paying on that note was equivalent to the salary of one teaching position, or roughly $40,000."

Glass gives kudos to the Cape Girardeau Public Schools Foundation for its work to aid the bottom line.

"The Foundation has been a big benefit to this district in applying for and receiving grants, which are very helpful to offset some expenditures," he said.

Glass said the district continues to build on the work of his retired predecessor, James Welker, who left in 2017 after nine years.

"We've been very diligent in building our fund balance — that was one of Dr. Welker's goals — and we picked up where he left off," Glass said.

"One of the big things was switching our health insurance plan from a fully-insured plan to a self-insured plan in 2015. That's helped us tremendously in stabilizing our health insurance premiums."

The Cape Girardeau School District has a FY 2022 budget with a projected $64.5 million in revenue and $64.7 million in expenses. The multi-million-dollar fund balance, Glass said, is more than enough to keep the district safely in the black.

Dudek said 52% of the district's revenue is locally-sourced, mostly from property tax receipts; 21% is from the State of Missouri; 18% is federal; 2% is from the county; and 7% is considered "other."