If Santa Rosa County Schools received the same amount of state funding per student as Escambia County will this coming school year, Santa Rosa would receive $7.4 million more than scheduled.

If Santa Rosa received perstudent funding equal to that of Okaloosa County, the additional money to local district coffers would be $6.6 million.

Instead, Santa Rosa ranks dead-last among Florida’s 67 school districts in state funding.

Susan McCole of the Santa Rosa School District’s financial office presented the grim, tentative budget for the 2010-11 school year during last week’s school board meeting.

“We are the cheapest place to live in the state, according to the state education authorities,” McCole explained. “As I understand, they actually go to the school districts and look at rent costs, buy groceries in all the grocery stores, go to restaurants, and buy clothing to check the cost of living in an area.”

Superintendent Tim Wyrosdick doesn’t understand how Santa Rosa could get such a different amount in funding than the two border counties.

“I have never understood the difference between us, Okaloosa or Escambia that amounts to such a big difference,” Wyrosdick said. “This year, for example, we would get $7 million more than we are slated to receive if we just got funded per student the same as Escambia. That is a huge difference!”

Wyrosdick has been pushing for regional funding by the state for some time. “It would be fairer (if) all the schools in one area of the state – like the Panhandle – received the same amount per student.”

This year’s proposed budget is just over $282.2 million, a 4.79 decrease from last year’s $314 million.

McCole pointed out savings from last year’s numbers in the areas of diesel fuel for buses, electricity, as well as having to pay less in unemployment benefits than expected.

“We saved about $800,000 in electric bills last year because of some changes we made at the schools in turning off computers and light,” she said. “We also had about $1 million folded back into this year’s funds from fuel since we did not spend as much in fuel as expected.”

The district received more than $2 million in FEMA funds for hurricane repairs requested in 2005.

The current estimated unreserved, undesignated fund balance for 2010-11 is set to add up to just over $15.6 million. That is 9.69 percent of the budget.

“The state wants every school district to keep a minimum undesignated fund balance of five percent each year, which would mean this year you would need to make sure and keep just over $8 million on hand in your reserves,” McCole said. “Santa Rosa has always tried to keep at least a seven-percent undesignated fund balance on hand in case of emergencies like storms, which would mean just over $11.3 million.”

However, of the budget revenues projected for the coming school year, just over $15.5 million is from the Federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known at federal stimulus dollars.

“We have no reason to believe those funds will be renewed for the following year after 2010-11,” McCole said. “We had stimulus funds from the federal government to help our budget for two years, and that is all that has been scheduled.”

If all the spending and expected revenues stayed the same for the coming year and the district did not have the federal stimulus funds, the undesignated fund balance only would be just over $100,000.

The budget for this school year calls for 87 new teachers to be hired. The main reason for most of the additional teachers, Wyrosdick said, is because of the state’s Class Size Constitutional Amendment.

“For the last couple years, we were able to average per school on class-size requirements under the amendment voters approved on class size,” Wyrosdick said. “But this year the requirement kicks in that all classes in all Florida schools must meet exactly the class size amendment requirements. The class size amendment was a good thing but also caused some complications. There is a lot of fallout that voters did not know about when they approved the class size amendment.”

He said that is why the district had to change its transfer policy for students wanting to transfer to another school within the district, tightening its rules and moving up the registration period.

“Some school districts are handling the class size amendment issue through rezoning or even limiting students who transfer into a district,” he said. “We are trying to handle it on the front end, so if students move into the district just as school starts we will have seats for them in a classroom. But we will know better shortly after school starts how out numbers look – so a ‘no’ on a transfer now might turn into a ‘yes’ later.”

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS