Vernon High School
The Vernon Township School District Board of Education on June 16 approved putting the district’s surplus, an amount not to exceed $3.25 million, into its accounts by the end of the 2021-22 budget year.
At the previous week’s work session, Finance Committee Chairman Justin Annunziata said the committee recommends putting $2.75 million into its capital reserve and about $500,000 into the maintenance reserve.
The district, when crafting the 2022-23 budget, drew down the capital reserve fund to pay for the window replacement projects at Vernon Township High School and Glen Meadow Middle School, and other projects such as the Glen Meadow bridge replacement.
“The long-range facilities plan that was conducted last year identified about $16 million in projects that the board can choose to tackle over the next five years,” Annunziata said. “We’ve begun tackling many of those projects such as the windows and the bridge and the unsafe sound levels in the music room, but there’s plenty more to do to bring our buildings up to the level of health and safety and wellness that we want from our faculty and for our staff and students.”
Any remaining funds over that – would couch be anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 – would go toward the 2022-23 school years as a revenue source. The exact amount won’t be known until after the district’s annual audit.
“That will be important as a revenue source in the 2023-24 school year budget because, as a reminder, we do have two more years of state aid cuts,” Annunziata said. “And we are using the fund balance right now as a revenue source, so that will cause a revenue-side problem in subsequent budgets if we don’t allocate some fund balance to that.”
