York SB to Approve Amended Budget Tonight

By Amber Lester Kennedy Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The York County School Board will likely approve an amended budget for fiscal year 2012 at a special meeting tonight.

The board will meet to review changes to the budget at 7:30 at the Grafton High School Media Center. The meeting with start with a period for citizen comments before the board takes action on the amended budget.

The School Board had to revisit its budget, originally approved in March, after the Board of Supervisors denied its request for level funding. County Administrator James McReynolds had told the school division that the board would likely cut school funding by more than $300,000, but the board chose to request the same amount of funding it received in fiscal year 2011.

The amended budget includes a provision for eligible employees to receive a one-time bonus. At its last work session, the board considered three options for a one-time payment. One option would provide a one-time bonus of $610; a second option would give $785 to full-time staff on the teacher salary schedule and $435 to all other staff; a third option would calculate the bonus based on 1.8 percent of employees’ base salary. The board asked the administration to bring back figures for a fourth option that would establish a minimum bonus amount of $350, the same amount given for one-time bonuses last year.

In its original budget, the board had approved a $1.2 million step pay increase for eligible employees, made possible when the division received extra state funding and its expenditures for the Virginia Retirement System were reduced.

The Board of Supervisors questioned the decision to use the one-time extra funding to pay for a recurring cost, and Supervisor Walt Zaremba suggested school funding be cut deeper to make a point. He said that school employees should not get raises when county employees have not seen their pay increase in three years. Ultimately, the other supervisors agreed to stick with the original plan to cut $337,000.