Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp.’s proposed budget for 2025 is about $168 million.
The BCSC school board held a public hearing for next year’s budget on Monday and is expected to vote on its adoption on Oct. 28.
BCSC’s proposed budget for 2025 is $168,551,147, up 10.7% from last year. The increase is largely due to a nearly $10 million payment BCSC is making on lease rental bonds for phase one of Envision 2030, its $306 million facilities plan. BCSC Superintendent Chad Phillips also noted that $6.1 million of the budget is drawing down existing cash in BCSC reserves, meaning the school corporation is going to increase revenues from other sources in 2025 about 6.7%.
After the Oct. 28 vote, the budget is submitted to the Department of Local Government and Finance. The state agency later returns with a property tax rate sometime around the beginning of next year, Phillips said during a budget work session on Sept. 9.
In addition, the proposed advertised tax rate is $1.0195 for every $100 of assessed value. BCSC officials in past years said the advertised rate is often a tad higher than where the adopted rate typically lands. For example, the advertised rate in 2024 was $1.0203 for every $100 of assessed value and the adopted rate ended up at $0.9985 for every $100 of assessed value.
The budget includes salary increases for staff— including 3% for classified staff. Increases for teachers and administrative staff are still to be determined, BCSC Treasurer Jamie Brinegar said.
Twelve full-time equivalent positions are being added, some of which had been funded through COVID-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, which expires on Sept. 30, according to Brinegar. Positions added include those in grades K-6 and the secondary level, literacy coaches as part of BCSC’s strategy in helping students pass IREAD-3, C4 positions and an additional person in each high school cohort.
The budget includes capital investments as well, including $2 million for safety infrastructure and $1.5 million in regular facility maintenance.
According to Phillips, the plan initially was to invest $500,000 for safety infrastructure over the next four years, but BCSC officials found that could be upped while keeping the tax rate the same.
“After talking and discussing here for awhile, we made the decision to go ahead and put the full $2 million there because if, in the middle of the calendar year, the technology advances such that there’s some really strong— we’ll just say metal detectors, for example, that aren’t intrusive and kids can just walk in and it doesn’t result in a long line of people outside the door, we could choose to invest in that in the middle of the year and purchase those to get ready for the next school year without having to wait to do an additional appropriation,” Phillips said.
In the education fund, BCSC is anticipating a 3.2% increase in revenues, which Brinegar called a “best-guess estimate” because “until the state meets and sets the budget for the next two-year cycle of the state’s budget, we won’t know what our fall (2025) revenues will be in relation to the education fund,” Brinegar said.
The state uses average-daily-membership (ADM) to allot tuition funding support to schools based on a per-pupil amount. The budget assumes a per-pupil amount of $6,681 in 2024-25, but that only goes through June of 2025, according to Phillips.
“So we made an assumption that the state will increase funding in fiscal year 2026 by 3%,” the superintendent said. “We’re hearing lots of chatter that it will be a tight budget season, but that’s the assumption that we plugged in.”
BCSC’s average daily membership estimates for this October are flat at an estimated 11,376 students, including an estimated 230 Columbus Virtual Pathways (CVP) students. The school corporation will only receive 85% tuition support from the state for CVP students, according to BCSC officials.
ADM estimates for the spring have BCSC down about 50 students. Phillips said counts for the spring in years past have been down between 100 and 150 students “but our cohorts are doing such a good job of keeping kids connected with the high school level and keeping them from dropping out.”
The vast majority of the education fund—95%—is earmarked for employee salaries and benefits.
“Those are due to the increase in the number of people, particularly teachers, but mainly the salary increases that were passed last fall,” Phillips said.
Other education fund differences from last year include an increase in the communications line-item to pay for software for BCSC students’ Chromebooks and replacement of old computers used for C4. Overall, expenditures in the education fund are up 6.5% from last year to an estimated $90,409,529 in 2025.
Revenue in BCSC’s operations fund is expected to grow just under 4.4% to $34.7 million. Expenditures within the operations fund are growing by 12%, mostly due to a 29.8% increase in supplies and utilities costs and a 29.3% increase in property and equipment line-items. The jump in property and equipment is due to the $2 million investment in safety infrastructure, Brinegar said.
A 13% increase in the operation fund’s professional services line-item is to increase pay for school resource officers, Phillips said. The estimated year-end cash balance for the operations fund is just over $10 million “which is still very healthy,” Brinegar said.
BCSC’s debt service fund is projected to be up 33% for next year, mostly due to the issuance of Envision 2030 lease rental bonds. The board in July passed a pair of resolutions releasing about $44.1 million in rental lease bonds as part of phase one of Envision 2030. BCSC is anticipating to make a $9.9 million payment on those in 2025. BCSC officials said in doing so that the tax rate will remain flat.
“That’s because of the fact that the operations fund and operating referendum fund rate will go down,” Phillips said during the work session earlier this month. “To the extent that this saves us some money in the long run, the larger payments you make on the front end of a mortgage, for example, the less interest you pay in the long run and so that should be helpful.”
The referendum operating fund is up 9.4% to $9.3 million, including an increase of $1.1 million in teacher salary and benefits.
“That’s just a continued result of more and more teachers are qualifying for those payments because they’re staying,” Phillips said. “It’s evidence that it’s actually working, because we have more teachers that are staying until their fifth year and their tenth year and their 15th year when they get those larger increases.”
The proposed 2025 budget can be accessed on BCSC’s BoardDocs website.
