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Show School board adopts budget By DONETA GATI1ZRIJM FARMINGTON The Davis County Board of Education voted Tuesday night, after press deadline, dead-line, on an operating budget for the 1988-89 fiscal year. A complete budget story will be printed in next week's paper. In preparing the budget, Supt. Richard Kendell indicated, "This year's budget has been particularly difficult for three fundamental reasons: The legislature in its last session made no change in the value of the Weighted Pupil Unit (WPU) for the third consecutive year. "The school district has been subjected to substantial budget cuts during the 1986-87 and 1987-88 years. About $5.5 million were wiped out of our budget during those two fiscal years. Finally, the District has been unable to maintain main-tain any kind of a budget reserve, which ordinarily could be a source of revenue during lean times." To deal with these serious problems, prob-lems, the administration, under the authorization of the Board of Education, Edu-cation, prepared a proposed budget which was presented at the June 7 board meeting. The proposed budget offered no cost-of-living salary increases for any category of employee. Teachers will receive full funding increments and lane changes that are part of the regular established salary schedules. To accommodate growth, the district planned to hire 70 additional addition-al teachers. This number has been trimmed to 35 new teachers. Individual school budgets and department budgets in the centrar -, office will remain unchanged from last year. A new fee schedule will be imposed im-posed on all junior high school students stu-dents and high school students. O CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 School district budget approved commented, "It is a sad commentary, commen-tary, that even without those items being addressed, this budget already includes increases in class size and takes a major step by increasing in-creasing student fees." Another problem that showed up in the preliminary budget was a decrease de-crease of 1.3 percent in the assessed asses-sed valuation of Davis County. Supt. Kendell said, "We are a poor county. Our people have a very high level of education and their salaries are high. They expect our schools to be the best in the state. This is a difficult situation because the assessed valuation per student for Davis District is the third lowest in the state. The taxing effort in Davis County ranks ninth in the state and the expenditure per pupil ranks 23rd out of 40 school districts." In order to compensate for the decrease in property tax, the budget reflected a 3.42 increase in the mill levy. This change in the Maintenance and Operation Levy is controlled by the state legislature. legisla-ture. The district is allowed to increase in-crease the Debt Service-Capital Outlay and 10 percent Basic Program Prog-ram levies to meet bond obligations. obliga-tions. Jack Olsen of the Utah Tax Payer's Association attended the preliminary budget hearing. He said, "The last thing taxpayers want is for the education system to unravel. We believe the time has come to have some limit on property proper-ty tax. This is the only tax in Utah without a limit. Our proposal may be too high, and if this is the case, it can be adjusted." The board asked Supt. Kendell to prepare some information for the final budget hearing regarding the impact the tax initiatives would have on Davis District if they passed. pas-sed. Supt. Kendell noted he had listed 30 categories where there were possible cuts. "These tax limitation proposals would have a dramatic impact in every area of the school district," Dr. Kendell concluded. O CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Charging text book and activity fees to seventh and eighth graders is a major change in the fee structure. struc-ture. Other important changes include in-clude making several school programs, prog-rams, such as summer school and community school, self-supporting. self-supporting. Students who need make-up or remedial credit in the junior and senior highs will have to pay a fee. At the tentative budget hearing held June 7, Brian Ferguson, vice president of the DEA, observed the "proposal does not include funding for a number of items now being discussed as part of the negotiations nego-tiations process, including salary increases to keep up with the cost-of-living and funding for health insurance in-surance coverage whose costs are inflating at a 19 percent annual rate." The DEA vice president further |