Putnam School Board Approves Budget, Cuts $6.1 Million

The Putnam County Board of Education voted Thursday to cut $6.1 million from its 2019-2020 budget.

Superintendent Jerry Boyd said the amount would have funded new positions, capital projects, and a 4-percent raise for teachers.

“It could have been a lot worse. We are thankful for the support we have gotten and we will make it work,” Boyd said. “It’s certainly not the picture that we wanted to be looking at right now, but we will continue to move forward and I know all our people across the school system will do an outstanding job.”

The board’s decision lowered a $6.6 million gap between projected revenue and expenditures. The school system’s $9 million fund balance will be used to cover the $500,000 gap that remains.

Boyd said future growth funds would hopefully reimburse the fund balance in early 2019.

“We get a notice based on any kind of enrollment growth that we had and the state reallocates what they call growth dollars,” Boyd said. “For the last several years, we’ve got notice of some growth funds that came our way. We anticipate that this year, but we won’t really know until December or January.”

The Putnam County Commission allocated about $2.2 million to the school system this week. Boyd said the board has decided to use part of that money for capital improvement projects.

“We will use some of those one-time funds to purchase buses,” Boyd said. “The remaining amount, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $900,000, will go to prioritizing the list of capital project needs.”

The board voted unanimously to approve the budget during Thursday’s meeting.