School board anticipating $2.6 million funding hit

CENTERVILLE — The St. Mary Parish School System is bracing for a $2.6 million hit to its Minimum Foundation Program funding between now and the remainder of the fiscal year due to the district losing about 440 students due to COVID-19’s effects.
School System Chief Financial Officer Alton Perry delivered the grim news to the school board Thursday that the school district has lost 445 students.
He said big losses are happening across the state.
Minimum Foundation Program money is state dollars allocated per pupil to public school districts to fund education . Counts tied to the Minimum Foundation Program are taken twice a year — on Feb. 1 and Oct. 1 — and funding allotments are adjusted based on those numbers. St. Mary lost 445 students between the Feb. 1 and Oct. 1 counts in 2020, Superintendent of Schools Teresa Bagwell said.
Bagwell said she doesn’t expect the count to improve greatly when the official count is taken again in about two weeks.
When funding must be reduced, Perry said, it typically occurs in the last three months of the fiscal year. However, he said the state is spreading the adjustments over six months this year because the cuts are so much bigger.
“Meaning we’re going to receive $443,000 less per month from now until June for a total of $2.6 million,” he said. “So we’re going to collect $2.6 million less” than the school system budgeted for.
While Perry said the situation is “very alarming,” he said it doesn’t mean things can’t improve next year.
However, in the interim, the district will have to grapple with the lost funds.
Perry said meetings have begun to determine ways to alleviate cuts.
“It is difficult to fund those types of cuts this late in the year because most of our expenditures are salary benefits, and schedules are set,” he said via KBZE 105.9 FM's Facebook live stream. “So we will mitigate what we can on the line items that we can and present a plan for next year should we see this trend continue.”
Bagwell said the student population count loss wasn’t limited to a certain age range, and school leaders only can attribute it to COVID-19’s effects because they have happened statewide.
“We really think that it’s a movement of people, maybe for employment purposes or whatever, as COVID began to shut down industries or small businesses,” Bagwell said after the meeting.
Educating students during a pandemic has come with a high price tag, too.
“With COVID, our expenses are 1.5 times what we anticipated because we’re buying hand sanitizer, we’re buying masks, we installed handwashing stations at schools,” Bagwell said.
She said the district used nearly all of its funding in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief & Economic Security Act that became law in March 2020 to fund laptops for all students so that instruction could continue in virtual and hybrid settings when necessary for this school year.
She is hoping there is more money available in the latest stimulus package passed last month to help the district.
Perry said there is hope that the state will help districts, too, since many are in this situation of having under-budgeted before such drastic student population losses occurred in the school year to follow.
“There is some hope that they will look at this and kind of freeze the funding and not reflect it. That’s the hope,” he said via KBZE 105.9 FM.
In another funding matter, Perry reported the board received $1.192 million in sales tax collections in December, down $43,000 from what was budgeted. However, he said overall, collections are up $172,000 so far in the fiscal year.