Batavia school board votes for $130 million tentative 2024 budget

The Batavia Public School District 301 Board voted to adopt a $130 million tentative budget for the 2024 school year at its Sept. 19 meeting.

“This budget totals $132 million in revenues and $130 million in expenses,” District Chief Financial Officer Anton Inglese said. “We expect our overall revenues to increase by 4.7% over the prior year and our expenditures to increase by 5.2%.

“Overall, our salaries we expect to increase in total by 8.1% to the sum of $50 million and our benefits to increase by 4.5% to sum $13 million. We also have a contingency of half a million dollars for any unanticipated expenses.”

The district would see a surplus of $2.6 million. Inglese said revenues were backed up by $2.2 million in investment earnings.

“The board has a very specific policy on this in terms of what we can invest our money in. They would have to be collateralized and insured,” Inglese said. “We’re not investing in stocks or anything like that.”

Inglese said the surplus is invested in CDs and U.S. Treasuries.

“While our student enrollment is declining slightly by a little bit more than 2%, that will improve our pupil to staff ratio to 7.7 students per staff members,” Inglese said.

Inglese said the 2015 ratio of students per staff was 9.8.

Food service, cleaning and transportation costs rose for the district because of economic conditions and labor shortages, according to the documents.

“My concern moving forward is that if we continue to see expenditures increase that will outpace our revenues, that will continue to put pressure on the amount of money that we have available [and] we won’t be able to undertake those investments,” Inglese said.

The district also voted to approve the $114,610 replacement of the Batavia High School weight room floors.

The flooring has been repaired once a year for the past five years, with diminishing returns on each repair, according to documents.

Documents said the new flooring would be installed over winter break.