Overton School Board Prioritizes Employee Pay, Building Projects In FY24 Budget Process

Overton County School Board hoping to address some of its building project needs in the coming fiscal year budget.

The board approved the first draft of its budget Tuesday night. School Board Chair Mike Hayes said the list of building projects was compiled after touring the schools to see wants and needs at each building. He said additional classroom space is the highest priority need at this point.

“As far as the building program is concerned our priority is to get with the County Commission, see what our borrowing capacity is,” Hayes said. “And at that point kind of scale down or whatever. Hopefully, the real-world scenario will be that they can come back and say here’s your capacity and it meets what we need, but that’s not always the case.”

Hayes said they also budgeted two new school buses. He said the board does its best to include buses in each budget to ensure a reliable fleet rotation.

Hayes said as always, employee salary and benefits will be another priority. He said once they get more numbers from the new TISA funding model, the board hopes to implement a new salary scale as well.

“Obviously the governor is going to increase the state minimum across the board for starting salaries,” Hayes said. “And obviously our focus is to try and increase it across the board so everybody gets a fair share of that. So that’s number one as far as our people and our employees.”

Hayes said the school board will have another budget committee meeting on June 5th.