Sitka School District officials say the school budget is in better shape than previously thought, but its fund balance is now down by over half-a-million dollars.
Late last month, Superintendent Phil Burdick told the Sitka Assembly that an audit in mid-February found several issues that would put the district in a deficit going into the next budget cycle, though at the time Burdick said a final tally was not yet available.
At a school board meeting Wednesday night, Superintendent Deidre Jenson said they’d initially planned to spend the district’s fund balance down to $750,000 by the end of this fiscal year to cover staffing costs. After revising this school year’s budget, Jenson said they now expect to spend the fund balance down to $223,000, which means they’ll be ending the school year with less leftover money than they initially planned.
“At our last board work session, we said that we were going to be funding at the end of the year, we were going to be ending at zero. So that is a positive thing, that we’re actually going to end up, plus we have put a spending freeze on, so that will help us as well,” Jenson said. “It’s not the $750,000 that we were anticipating having at the end of the year, but it’s also not zero.”
Business Manager Kathrynn Hollis-Buchanan said the difference could be attributed to a few things, including overestimating the district’s enrollment, and the mistaken addition of $650,000 to the district’s revenue for FY26. She said that was due to an overestimate of the amount of available leftover funds from the previous year.
The Sitka school board unanimously approved the budget updates to account for some state funding increases, and the removal of the leftover funds.
