Tennessee Association of School Business Officials - May President s Message

Transcription

1 TASBO NEWSLETTER Tennessee Association of School Business Officials - May 2006 President s Message Your Board of Directors is hard at work planning the 40 th Annual TASBO Conference in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. We met in March for our quarterly meeting and discussed the details for celebrating 40 years of TASBO. Our conference will kickoff Tuesday, November 14, 2006 at the Music Road Hotel & Convention Center with the Opening General Session, followed by a special dinner honoring all Past Presidents and Distinguished Service Award recipients. Jeff Denton, author of Don t Let the Idiots Win and Please Don t Throw Me Under the Bus, will be our guest speaker and promises to entertain us all for the evening. Maryanne Durski, President-Elect, has a packed day of speakers with the latest and greatest topics for your education and training on Wednesday. The evening is open so you can network with your peers and enjoy all the Smoky Mountains have to offer. We re taking you outside the box on Thursday. You ll find an exciting display of airplanes mixed in with our normal vendor exhibits at the Aviation Museum. After a morning spent visiting the museum and talking with vendors/sponsors, we ll have lunch and recognize this year s Distinguished Service Award recipient. The afternoon will bring a mega session for all back at the Music Road Convention Center. Another trip offsite for entertainment and dinner on Thursday evening to Dolly Parton s theme park Dollywood will give you time to relax and visit with friends. What better way to end our week, than with nationally recognized motivational speaker and possibility coach, Roger Crawford. Roger will leave you with the desire to rise above your current level of performance and return to your workplace a changed person. At the request of many from last years conference, we will once again take donations for the Ronald McDonald House. A box will be available all day Wednesday for your monetary donations. This service project will help the families of children staying at the Knoxville Ronald McDonald House. We will make the presentation to the Knoxville representative on Thursday at lunch. I, along with a few fellow TASBO members, just returned from the SASBO annual conference in Louisville, KY. What a wonderful experience we had Racing for Excellence. Speakers with a vast array of topics were available. However, the discussions with other ASBO members from the twelve southeastern states proved to be very beneficial too. As school business officials we have to remind ourselves: we have one main reason to continually search for methods of improvement the children! Promote thinking outside the box every day in your professional and personal life. Be positive, compassionate and dedicated in everything you do in order to meet our goal. Enjoy the summer with your family! Diane Frank, President 2006

2 From the March Board Room: Annual Conference - Diane Frank, President, updated the board on the 40 th Annual Conference to be held in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. A site visit was made in February by Diane Frank, Colette Arnold, Roger Underwood, and Ron Woody. Exhibit Booths - Middle Tennessee board member Colette Arnold will oversee the vendor exhibit booths. Approximately 65 booths will be available for the 2006 conference. Booth vendor fees were established as follows: $400 single, $750 double, $1,100 triple if paid by June 1 and $450, $850, $1,250 after June 1. Vendors are entitled to two tickets per booth for each breakfast and lunch on exhibit day, Christmas in the Smokies and dinner at Dollywood. If you have a potential vendor exhibitor, contact Colette at (931) or arnoldc1@k12tn.net. Sponsorship - Joe Anderson, immediate past president, will coordinate sponsorship. Please contact Joe at (901) or janderson@scsk12.org, if you have a potential vendor sponsorship. To help with the conference cost, the board is being challenged to seek sponsorship totaling $40,000 to coincide with the 40 th Annual Conference. Sponsorship levels were set as follows: Diamond $5,000 and above Platinum $3,000- $4,999 Gold $2,000-$2,999 Silver $1,000-$1,999 Bronze $500-$999 Patron under $500 Sponsors will be recognized throughout the conference with announcements at special events and ribbons displayed on their booths. We will remember our sponsors at every opportunity. We could not have the events, meals or extras without them! Program Schedule Pigeon Forge Conference: Maryanne Durski, President-Elect, discussed the program schedule. Details will be forthcoming in June Nashville Conference: Update was given by Maryanne. The contract is in the works for keynote speaker, Troy Evans Chattanooga Conference: Update was given by Ron Woody. The contracts for the convention center and hotel were executed this past quarter. A keynote speaker has not been selected. Dues - The board discussed paying the SASBO dues as a benefit of TASBO membership. No action was taken on SASBO dues or TASBO dues. By-Laws Discussion - Chris Henson, past president, distributed a potential by-law s change related to member attendance. The recommended by-laws change would state Directors must attend a minimum of three (3) regular meetings during the year to remain on the board unless extenuating circumstances are approved by the board. This will come before the membership for a vote at the closing session on November 17, Membership Drive - For our 2006 goal, board members have been assigned non-member school systems to contact who may not be TASBO members to encourage membership. President Frank would like to see at least one representative from each school system in the State participate in TASBO.

3 39 th Conference TASBO Service Project-Ronald McDonald House of Memphis A warm thanks to our members and vendors for their support of the 2005 TASBO Conference s charity the Ronald McDonald House of Memphis. Our final donation was over $2,100 in money and supplies. The Ronald McDonald House of Memphis is a home-away-from-home for 51 children and families. Each family has a very brave child who is battling cancer and is receiving treatment at St. Jude Children s Research Hospital. At the Ronald McDonald House, families can sleep in warm beds, take a shower in their private bathroom, and prepare and eat meals in a spacious, cheerful kitchen. They also have access to a fitness room, meditation room, one of three laundry rooms, a park with a playground, a basketball court, and a pavilion. More importantly, families find support and comfort from each other. All families stay free of charge. Since our main focus is making a better life for children, the excellent support for this charity was just another way for us to Reach for the Stars! Audit Comments, Fund Balances, and LGDPC Software By Ron Woody, CPA, CGFM, CSBA What do all of these have in common? They all deal with county s budgets. The fund balance is always a topic of discussion when it comes to adopting budgets and managing public funds. Households, nonprofits, and government budgets should often ask, debate, and answer the question, What should our fund balances be? You often hear personal financial consultants tell you that your household should have the equivalent of six months expenses tucked away in a rainy day/emergency fund. An emergency fund is a highly liquid fund where you can get to your money if something unexpected happens. Emergency funds would not be spent on a new car, vacation or a boat but would be used in case you became unemployed or had an unexpected medical bill. Even at TASBO board meetings we discuss what our TASBO balance is and debate what it should be (we believe that the fund balance should be around the amount of an annual conference budget). Too much of a fund balance means that we are not investing in our membership, charging too much for conference attendees, charging exhibitors or soliciting vendors at too high a level, or a combination of all of these. Having too little balance prohibits us from hosting improved and innovative conference. We, at TASBO, must annually discuss and find the right fund balance for our organization. This brings us back to the question of what should a county s individual fund balances be? Each county and each fund has a different set of criteria to meet. For a Typical County, USA with a population 50,000, here are some examples: 1) The General Fund may need 40% of their annual expenditures budget as a fund balance. This would allow the General Fund to operate each year without borrowing on revenue anticipation notes. The biggest revenue source in the General Fund is property taxes which are not delinquent until at the end of the seventh month in the fiscal year, thus cash is needed to pay the first seven months of bills. 2) The General Debt Service Fund may have a fund balance of 50 percent to 150 percent depending on when notes and bonds are due to be paid during the fiscal year along with future anticipated projects and the actual dollar size of the fund. The Debt Service Funds generally have higher balances in order to allow the county to show a stronger financial picture. Now just think how it would look to your lending institutions if you had to borrow funds on revenue anticipation notes to make payments on borrowed money.

4 What about the School Fund Balances? What should they be? We have the Federal (210.19) and State (TCA ) laws on Food Service, which state you should have no more than 3 months fund balance. If you have any excess, your system must submit a capital plan to invest in the program. Federal Projects are required to be minimum due to federal requirements (cash management act), but it should not be negative. For the General Purpose Schools, we have statutes on a 3% fund balance (TCA (c)) but not on what a system should have as an optimal fund balance. I would recommend up to 10% of the current year s expenditure budget, which is a large amount on a 50 million dollar school budget. Is the number truly that big? For example, if 85% of a school budget is fixed in nature (salaries and benefits, utilities, and property insurance paid the first day of the fiscal year), then approximately 3.5 to 4.2 million will be spent each month on fixed cost. Ten percent gives you a little over one month s cash flow or cushion. Debate what your fund balances should be, establish a formal or informal policy, and work your proposed budgets considering your fund balance policy. Reflecting an accurate fund balance is more important than having a fund balance policy and obeying or violating the policy. We have started seeing more and more audit findings related to a county projecting an unrealistic fund balance or even not reflecting a fund balance. Here are two excerpts from recent county audits: The General Purpose School Fund s actual fund balance and reserves at July 1, 2004, was $558,704; however, the estimated fund balance and reserves reflected in the county s budget was $0. The estimated beginning fund balance and all revenues should be made on a more realistic basis to provide county officials with accurate information to base funding decisions. Adjust your projected beginning fund balance during the budget process to more accurately reflect your financial operations. Even though your State Department of Education s financial report reflects fund balances, the official fund balances are the audited fund balances reflected by the Tennessee Comptroller Office s annual financial report or your local auditor s report. Make sure you are using the audited fund balances, when available. To assist counties in preparing budgets and reflecting more accurate fund balances, Local Government Data Processing Corporation has written a new budget software packet. The title of the new software is County Budget. A new feature in the software allows audited fund balances to be included in the historical column of the worksheet. It further allows, if available, the first column to have inserted audited numbers on the budgetary basis. Take a look at Local Government s new budget software tool. Happy Budgeting

5 What s Happening in the Southeastern Region (SASBO)? Roger Underwood was recommended by the Board of Directors as our Tennessee nominee for the 2006 SASBO Outstanding School Business Official. He was recognized at the SASBO Annual Conference on Wednesday, April 26 th in Louisville, KY for this award. Congratulations Roger! Thank you for your dedication and hard work in both TASBO & SASBO. Calendar of Events 40 th Annual TASBO Conference (Mark your calendar) November 14-17, 2006 Music Road Hotel & Convention Center, Pigeon Forge, TN (For hotel reservation call or online at group code ) From the Certification/Training Committee Diane Frank, Roger Underwood, Maryanne Durski and Colette Arnold met with State Department of Education representatives, regarding the TASBO certification program being recognized in State statute. Discussions and meetings will continue to establish the necessary guidelines and action to be taken in order to bring our organization to a new level. The Board approved the following certifications as recommended by the Certification/Training Committee. New Certifications: Julie Cook- Putnam County- Official Level I Joy Vaughn- Sullivan County Specialist Level III Gail Harrison-Sullivan County Specialist Level III Janice Bailey- Lawrence County Specialist Level II Melissa Pritle-DeKalb County Specialist Level I Recertifications Colette Arnold-Manchester City Official Level III Dianne Holt- Milan Special Specialist Level III Lisa Springer- Milan Special Specialist Level III Barbara Corlew- Dickson County- Specialist Level III Vickie Engelhardt-Lawrence County- Administrator Level II Membership: If you are interested in joining the Tennessee Association of School Business Officials (TASBO), please visit our web site at for a membership application. We welcome you to become involved in the education of the children in Tennessee thru our organization.