BCSC school board members voted to adopt their 2025 budget on Monday night and as part of that, also approved a resolution to transfer $665,599 from BCSC’s education fund to its operations fund.
The transferring has happened annually since 2017 and been a topic of conversation during the current race for three seats on the school board. It’s also an expressed concern among a couple of school board members.
BCSC Superintendent Chad Phillips explained that HB 1009, passed by the state legislature in 2017, required schools to move a significant amount of salaries and benefits that had been part of BCSC’s general fund to the operations fund, “which didn’t exist before 2017.”
As an example, Phillips said there are millions of dollars in salaries and benefits for the district’s custodians that moved from the old general fund to the operations fund, but “it moved no revenues with those expenditures.”
“The (state legislature) obviously knew that would present a problem for districts and authorized the transfer of up to 15% of your education fund to move to the operations fund every year,” according to Phillips. “Since that time, our move of dollars from the education fund has been under 10%, which is well below the average of other districts.”
Indiana Code § 20-40-2-6 authorizes those transfers and BCSC shares the transfer amount with the Columbus Educator’s Association when the budget is calculated, per Phillips.
Jason Major, board member, district 1, had wondered about the transfer during school board meetings discussing the 2025 budget in September.
Both he and Logan Schulz, board member, district 6, have also noted that BCSC has $35 million in cash reserves, which school corporation officials said is a result of a number of factors including conservative budgeting, higher-than-expected interest rates that past two years and increasing property tax evaluations in the county.
Major said on Monday night, “How do we work with the statehouse to understand how we can work on growing our operations budget? Our operations fund is limited at this point in time and we keep taking money from education to put into operations, which then we have less money in education, which means fill that back up with referendum.”
Mandy Keele, vice president of the Columbus Educator’s Association, attended the school board meeting and was part of an operating referendum update presentation that walked through improvements BCSC has made in areas like teacher retention, bus safety and access to STEM opportunities due to the referendum.
“Everytime we bargain, that is actually on our checklist of items to review in terms of, are the school corporations transferring what is within a recommended percentage of those funds?” Keele said. “And having been on several bargaining teams, I can assure everybody that’s here, BCSC is well within what the state would recommend in terms of that overall percentage that is being transferred from the education fund to operations, and that is something that ISTA (Indiana State Teacher’s Association) has us look at as the bargaining teams.”
In 2020, 61.3% of Bartholomew County voters approved an operating referendum, with the purpose being to fund recruitment and retention of staff and to invest in student safety in security. The public can click on the “Referendum 2020” tab on bcscschools.org to see how BCSC is delivering on those goals.
