Perryville teachers, administrators get $400 raise to base pay

Teachers and administrators in Perry County's District 32 will be getting a $400 raise to their base pay next year, bringing beginning teacher salaries to $32,000.

Classified, or non-certified, staff members will get a 40-cent hourly raise that will put their pay at $10 an hour.

Superintendent Andrew Comstock said those are the highlights of the 2016-2017 budget that began Friday, his first day on the job. Each year's fiscal year begins July 1 and ends June 30.

Despite some confusion about last year's amended budget, its status is better than it appeared when board members questioned certain figures during a special meeting Thursday night.

"I'm very pleased that the financial status of District 32 is solid, and that the board of education and our administrators have made great strides in recent years to strengthen our financial position even further," Comstock said in an email.

Some school board members on Thursday, however, wondered where about $600,000 had gone and what it had been spent on by the time they met again -- the deadline for approving last year's amended budget so they could begin the new fiscal year the following day.

The board reluctantly approved the $22.7 million amended budget that night, along with approving the $22.9 million budget for 2016-2017, but demanded clarification at least by the time of their next meeting July 13.

As soon as Comstock began his new job, he started looking over the numbers, he said.

Instead of a shortfall, he found a budget surplus that could keep the district going for up to four months if no other money arrived.

"We just closed the 2015-2016 school year with $585,242 more than the board had budgeted, leaving our fund balance at $8,734,791.63," Comstock said in the statement. "Since we operate a $23 million budget, that's about 37 percent."

Comstock said the reason board members had so many questions about last year's budget Thursday was because a bookkeeper was on vacation when they met, and not all the information they needed was set out in the figures they were given.

Plus, with three board members new to the public-sector budgeting process, some of the numbers were confusing and differed from what they might see in the private sector.

At a meeting the week before, then-superintendent Scott Ireland had asked the board whether they would rather wait to discuss the budget until additional information became available.

So they tabled the discussion to the June 30 meeting, which was Ireland's last day on the job and the last possible moment for any discussion of the 2015-2016 budget.

Ireland did not attend the meeting Thursday and was unable to provide further insight.

ljones@semissourian.com

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