By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Brandon Twp.-On Monday at the school board meeting, Paul Bryant and Chris Kassob of Plante Moran presented the school district’s annual financial statements and auditor’s report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021.
The board voted 7-0 to approve the audit.
According to the audit for the fiscal year 2020-2021 the general fund revenues of $26,014,728 with expenditures of $25,735,826, kept the fund balance the same at $4,124,117. The budget for the fiscal year would have put $71,018 into the fund balance, but the district was unable to do so due to a decrease in revenue. Of that fund balance, the unassigned portion accounts for 7.93 percent of expenditures.
“Your final budget that was approved in June, you were expected to add to your fund balance $71,000, you basically broke even. With all the different things that are going on in the school districts, not just yours but in general, look how well you budgeted for the current year,” said Bryant. “You broke even is what you did, and you were able to put dollars, your excess, away to make future debt payments which is great planning from a strategic perspective.”
This year there was an increase in federal funds, which is due to the non-recurring money coming from Coronavirus Relief Funds as well as ESSER funds. The percentage of funds going towards instruction is at 54.69 percent.
“The past several years the district has been spending approximately 56 cents of every dollar towards instruction, those are costs that really benefit the classroom,” said Kassab.

“You’ll notice a slight decrease this year, and that’s primarily related to the non-instruction related expenses like capital outlay, some of this COVID related funding was used to purchase personal protective equipment, cleaners, air purifiers, so that sort of increased some the non-instructional related expenditures to skew this percentage down slightly.”
The number of students has gone down slightly, 16 students from the 2019-2020 school year. The funding per pupil is at $8,111.
“You’ve still been able to make solid decisions, tough decisions, but still strategic, though decisions on behalf of the district to keep a balanced budget to be able to still provide programming,” said Bryant. “You’ve made some tough decisions, but you can still see you’re moving in a positive direction, doing what you can do under the circumstances.”