BROOKINGS – With the Brookings School Board’s approval of general fund budget parameters on Monday night, the school district has taken its first steps toward preparing a budget proposal for the 2019-2020 school year.

It was approved 4-0, with Roger DeGroot absent from the meeting.

As Brookings School District Superintendent Klint Willert explained, the budget parameters help district officials set guidelines in place as they work on creating a budget for the next school year. While there are no numbers included in the parameters, it does outline three general objectives they’ve prioritized while drafting a budget.

Those three objectives are to continue to meet state required accountability metrics and parameters established for teacher compensation, to balance the district general fund budget, and to utilize current fund balance and capital outlay only with specific authority of the board.

In regard to the first objective, Willert said, “We lead off with the recognition of how important it is to meet accountability and the metrics related to accountability. Those are not going away, at least not anytime soon, so that has to be a very important aspect of any budget development process.”

The second objective – the balancing of the general fund budget – consists of several parts. They are to project salary increases as resources allow, to utilize all increases in state aid, to anticipate routine expense increases such as utilities and insurance, to address reasonable expense increases due to the Mickelson Middle School addition, to project student enrollment on a rolling three-year average, and to incorporate any changes in class size targets as adopted by the school board.

Willert concluded by noting that the school board and the school district have committed to maintaining reasonable class sizes and to be competitive in terms of teacher salaries and benefits.

“We know as we look at our general fund budget, our needs haven’t changed, our obligations to our community haven’t changed, our commitments to our community haven’t changed,” he said.

With a variety of legislation coming through Pierre that deals with education in the state, there will be a lot of careful watching and waiting during the development of a proposed budget.

For example, the possibility of adding a civics class in order to graduate from high school might mean having to hire another history teacher or changing things within a class or classes to meet the legislation’s requirements if approved.

At this moment, though, “we don’t know what the fiscal impact of that might be,” Willert said.

“We want to continue to be a leading district in South Dakota, a leading district in the upper Midwest and the country, and to do that, we need to be as dynamic as our population is and as our needs are,” Willert said. “Again, that means we have to be very strategic and judicious about how we allocate and where we allocate our resources.”

Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.