During Monday’s Whitfield County Board of Education meeting, Whitfield County Schools (WCS) Chief Financial Officer Kelly Coon provided details on a one-time, $1,000 state employee retention supplement that was announced by Gov. Brian Kemp in December.
“Our district will be issuing that supplement Friday, Jan. 19, to our employees,” Coon said. “We’ve talked about the supplement and the board is in full support of passing that supplement along to all district employees.”
As described by Kemp, the $1,000 supplement will be given to K-12 educators, school support staff and state employees. Individuals eligible for the supplement include those with a regular, benefits-eligible status, working 30 or more standard hours as of Dec. 1, 2023, and who are “actively employed at the time the payment is processed.”
“We received funding based on the October ’23 CPI (Certified Personnel Information) and FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) information, but of course the funding that we receive from the Department of Education never covers all of the employees in our school district,” Coon said. “So thankfully our board is in support of again giving that supplement to all employees, so that information will be coming shortly.”
Coon also provided an update on the financials for Whitfield County Schools.
“The financials presented tonight are as of Nov. 30, which is 42% of the fiscal year FY ’24,” she said.
Coon presented data that detailed that the total revenue for the school district totaled $54,011,092, with almost $9 million coming from property taxes.
“You’ll see that the property tax line is starting to increase,” Coon said. “At Nov. 30, we’re at 26.41%.”
Coon mentioned a “one-time homeowner tax relief grant payment” to the district totaling $3.7 million that the district received for November.
“In talking to the commissioner’s office, again that was a one-time payment,” she said. “We didn’t anticipate that coming and it will not be back. But that came in the month of November, so the revenue that we posted at almost $9 million in property taxes also includes the large chunk from that grant. But in December we’re going to see that number skyrocket as the property tax revenue is streaming in.”
Coon said general fund expenditures were at 40.90% by the end of November, which is “right in pace of where we want to be.”
For capital fund revenue, Coon said “collections continue to come in strong.”
By the end of November, the district’s ESPLOST (Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) VI collection totaled $1,333,932.63 alongside another $81,992.83 in annual interest earnings.
Coon presented a detailed summary of the district’s special revenue fund.
“Again, I’ll just remind everybody of a special revenue fund summary which covers federal and state grants,” she said. “The revenue may look a little bit low here (a year-to-date revenue of $6,796,630), but those were drawdown grants so as those November expenditures come through, we begin to do a request to draw down, so the revenue kind of always catches up with the expenditures.”
Coon said at the Feb. 5 board meeting at Westside Middle School she will present a general fund budget amendment.
“We adopted a budget in June of ’23 and then the tax digest came in higher than we had anticipated, so I’m going to take the time to true up our general fund budget to pool the property tax revenue where it should be. Of course, now we have this one-time grant, too, that we want to take into consideration, and also the QBE (Quality Basic Education) adjustment for that one-time supplement that we will have the expenditures for.”
Coon detailed a resolution to request the third, “and our hope is the final,” transfer from the general fund to the capital projects fund of $3.6 million.
“We started this project back in FY ’21, earmarking general fund dollars and transferring them over to the capital projects general fund to work on our new district office facility,” Coon said. “This has been a project in the works that we have been saving and earmarking money, and allocating specifically for that purpose. The district office is making its way through the contract, so we’re finally at a place that we can figure out an estimate of where we were going to end that project.”
“And I just want to remind everyone that there were no ESPLOST dollars used for the district office,” she said. “This was all from general fund dollars that we had for this specific purpose, so a one-time expense.”
The board members voted 5-0 to accept the financials and to approve the resolution.