Laporte resolves school budget

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

June 6, 1996

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

LAPORTE -- A few months ago, the Laporte School Board was informed of something unsettling. Superintendent Tom Behounek discovered the school district may spend $83,000 more than it raised for the 1995-96 school year.

"When we did our expenditure projections for this year, we found out our expenditures would be more than our revenue," Behounek said at Tuesday's board meeting. "The problem was when got out a lot of people may have thought the Laporte School District was broke. It's not."

Behounek explained that when a school district goes into the "red" it can use money from a fund balance to alleviate the deficit. The fund balance is money accumulated in an account from previous years when a district has been in the "black."

"It's just like a checking account. If you don't spend all of your paycheck, your account continues to grow," Behounek said. "If you spend more than you make, you have to go to your savings account. We had to go to our savings account."

The Laporte School Board approved the use of money from the fund balance, which cured the budget problems for the closing of this school year. However, the board also made reductions in several areas so the budget would be more in line next year.

School Board Chairman Jim Day said he believes the original problem occurred last year in the preparation of this year's budget.

Day said there was an interim superintendent who did not carefully prepare the budget. When Behounek gained the position this year, Day said, he could not follow the same budget.

"In the beginning of the year, we had a number of expenditures," Behounek said. There were some structural repairs the building needed, a new phone system was implemented throughout the school, and the district had to hire additional teachers and teacher aides to accommodate an influx of non-resident students.

Non-resident students are students who attend the school but do not live in the school district, Behounek said.

"It's a one-year problem. The district is in good shape," Behounek said. "But you don't want to continue to spend the fund balance. We're going to be very careful about any of our expenditures this coming year."

For the new budget, the board voted to cut two positions from the school's Chapter 1 program and two positions from the special education program, but the board will revisit the decision later in the summer, Day said.

The board also cut the full-time elementary principal position, and Behounek will assume those duties. Supplies expenditures also were reduced by $35,000, among other reductions that were made.

"I'm not blaming anybody. It just won't happen again," Day said. "Mr. Behounek learned something, and we did too."