Marilyn Plett

There is a little more padding in the surplus account at Hanover School Division.  Finance Chair Marilyn Plett says the audited numbers confirm the year ending June 30 was a financial success.  "We had budgeted an increase in our reserve of $ 315,000 and at the end of June we actually have an increase of $750,000 more than expected bringing total surplus to $1,064,000.  Our total reserve is about $3.6 Million and we are sitting about 5.48% of our expenditures."

She explains they are looking at a lot of extra money.  "Some of that is dollars that we have put aside for new school startup both the Clearspring Middle School and the SRSS.  We also had put money aside to do some warehouse renovations and didn't get to it till the end of June so those dollars are sitting in there.  The is also $186,000 for computer replacement that we had budgeted over the last year or two and hadn't spent yet but we are moving into that very aggressively as of July 1.  Then there was some money that we had allocated to our schools but they haven't spent all of it."

Plett says there are also some regular items that cost less than expected.  "Our property taxes, our natural gas came in about $275,000 less than we had budgeted, fuel about $40,000 less, our electricity bill about $50,000 less.  Then there was one fairly big item, the MSBA that carries our pensions waived our pension fees for this last year and that was an additional $125,000 that was added into our total reserves.

She says none of these are huge items but they add up and it feels good to have extra money in the bank.  "We are looking at two new schools in the next short while.  We know that to run schools costs a lot of dollars.  We have to hire additional people, buildings have to be kept warm, custodians, etc come into that and it will really put a squeeze on the dollars that we have.  To have extra dollars put away for some of this is just a very good feeling.  There have been years past where we had been running a very tight ship that we couldn't have done some of these things, at least it felt like we couldn't do those things so this feels good."