The Missoula County Public Schools Board of Trustees unanimously passed the budgets for the 2018-2019 elementary and high school districts on Monday night.

Communications Director Hatton Littman provided the raw numbers for each district.

“Starting with the high schools, the general fund budget comes in at $29,961,994 dollars,” Littman said. “Add in the other funds that make up our overall budget, transportation, tuition, retirement, adult ed and other items, and the high school district comes to a total of $48,042,229 dollars. On the elementary side, the general fund portion of that budget is $39,437,677 dollars. Adding all the other funds that go into the budget, the total goes up to $60,170,512 dollars for an overall total of a little over $100,000,000 dollars."

Littman said the vast majority of those monies go to personnel costs.

“We all know that schools are a people-centered business, and we’re actually north of 90 percent of the annual budget being allocated to staff salaries,” she said.

Littman had one important addition to the school budget picture.

“There’s one other thing that we want to clarify because there’s been a lot of talk in the local news about how our city and county are going to meet their budget with regard to the lower value of our mils,” she said. “The city council will be asked to consider taking some money out of the Urban Renewal Districts, which would mean that the city, the county and the school district would all receive distributions of funds from those urban renewal districts. What’s been proposed is about $1 million being sent to Missoula’s public schools. It’s really important to know that that $1 million does not act as a budget surplus beyond what the Trustees approved last night. By state statute, the monies have to either go into the district’s reserves to bolster that account, or it has to reduce taxpayer impact in some other fund that we hay have had to levy taxpayers on.”

 

 

More From Alt 95.7