For the first time in nine years, the Prescott School District will present an unbalanced budget to electors at the annual meeting and budget hearing, scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27 in the Prescott High School Library.

Like many school districts in the area, the district had an expectation of additional funding coming from the Wisconsin State Legislature after they were able to balance budgets and pay for programming the last few school years by federal pandemic funds while the state surplus has exploded to more than $7 billion.

In April, Prescott Superintendent Dr. Rick Spicuzza warned the board that the district would need additional state aid in the neighborhood of $650 per student, but he was hopeful that the State Legislature would come through for school districts, especially since per pupil aid was frozen while school districts were able to balance budgets with federal dollars. When lawmakers finished their session, the two-year budget passed by the legislature over the summer sends an additional $325 to the PSD.

“It is kind of a gut check and a reality check about what happened over the summer with education funding,” Spicuzza told the school board at its Wednesday, Sept. 20 meeting. “These are my words: ‘nonfunding.’ It was unfortunate this happened and was allowed to happen.”

That likely means the district will have to use cash reserves this year. The board plans to meet for a workshop in the next month to plan for next year’s budget.

Dollars have been trimmed to get the 2023-24 school year budget to $17,957,248, down from last year’s budget of $18,374,471.10.

Total revenue to support the budget is projected at $16,604,494 for 2023-24, leaving a revenue shortfall of $1.35 million.

Spicuzza said the budget will be a work in progress until the board has to vote to approve it in October.

Spicuzza pointed out that when this year’s Prescott High School seniors were in 4K, Wisconsin ranked 17^th in the nation in funding public education, spending 7.2 percent more than the national average. It now ranks 25^th, with education funding that lags other states by 5.2 percent.

He lauded district staff and students for doing remarkable things coming out of COVID, and he believes the school district deserves better.

“They’ve amassed $7 billion. It sits at Madison and has not come back to a district that has continued to do remarkable things,” he said.

The district does have cash reserves of around $2 million, but Spicuzza said that will evaporate quickly without other funding sources.

“The storm has arrived,” said Spicuzza. “We can weather this short-term.”

He said the administration, board, staff and community need to put their collective heads together to determine “how we can build a budget that we can sustain for the future.”

Director of Finance Sue Gerdes explained to the school board that 92 percent of the revenue loss from last school year is due to the loss of the federal pandemic funds. She said the district was able to trim expenditures by about $400,000 from last year, mostly through changes in staffing, with new teachers on the low-end of the salary scale replacing retiring teachers and through its facilities operating more efficiently.

“We are going to have to look for any and all ideas to close the gap,” she said.

The district is also projecting to have 21 fewer students than last year, which means a hit on per-pupil aid.

“21 fewer students is a quarter-million dollars,” Spicuzza said. “You can see how this is not getting to a point how revenue has walked back from what we anticipated in April. We have an unbalanced budget for the first time in nine years.”

Spicuzza is hoping that the district can get away with using only up to $750,000 of reserves as work continues to find funding. One idea was to move maintenance projects to the district’s Capital Projects fund if they are eligible or if board members have other ideas.

“Sue and I need to know that tonight to start identifying big things,” Spicuzza said. “We’re looking for elephants, not mosquitos.”

Board members were adamant that they don’t want to cut programming or staffing since Prescott has risen to the top locally in achievement and test scores.

“We all knew this was coming. You’ve done a really good job of keeping us aware of this. It’s a concern that we don’t want to cut our programming. We know what we’re doing here works,” said Tanya Holub. “We’re in a tough spot.”

Next year will be even more difficult.

“Next year’s going to be the headscratcher, unless we get an increase in funding,” Vicki Rudolph said.

“There is no new funding,” Spicuzza said. “I haven’t seen any ray of hope at the state legislature. It’s unfortunate.”

Board president Mike Matzek stressed this just isn’t a Prescott problem.

“Our district is financially well run as any district you can ask for. The state is pushing these issues to local communities, to the taxpayers themselves,” he said. “We can absorb a big cut for a short period of time, a year. I’m not sure two years. That’s short term. We’ve got to come up with a long-term plan. This isn’t going to last.”

It was pointed out that some local districts are exploring referendum votes to get additional operational funding.

“The state is pushing this on the local taxpayers. They’re going to have to make decisions there. A work session is going to be needed if we’re going to get our ducks in a row for next year,” Matzek said. “We just passed a referendum for $15 million. We are extremely grateful and lucky we got it passed. That really sets us up to manage these buildings in a responsible manner. People are going to wonder why we’re in such trouble. It’s happening everywhere.”

Matzek spoke to the audience attending the meeting and said, “We need help within the community to spread that message to people.”

“If our community is supportive of our staff and our students, we may need to ask them to help to sustain those programs,” said Spicuzza.