Last year’s Culver school referendum is helping to fund teacher raises, LED lighting installation, and some new academic programs. Last November, voters agreed to let the school district raise property taxes by up to 17 cents per $100 of assessed valuation for an eight-year period. A breakdown of how that money is being used so far, as well as some future plans, was presented during a school board work session Monday.
Overall, the referendum is bringing in almost $1.6 million in new revenue to the school corporation this year. A big chunk of that is going to the LED lighting project, according to Superintendent Karen Shuman. “Currently, we’ve paid $400,000 on that lighting project,” she said, “and then we still have another $267,000 to pay on the lighting project.”
About $190,000 was spent on the teacher and staff pay raises that were approved in January. Shuman explained that the referendum money is only covering the incremental increases. The rest of most of those salaries continues to come out of the Education Fund. There are also a couple of smaller purchases, including new building door signs and pre-k instructional supplies.
Going forward, school officials are planning to use referendum money to help pay salaries for a few new positions. These include a full-time athletic director, middle/high school computer science teacher, an elementary school STEM program, and a middle school health position. Shuman added that the school corporation has added a third section of pre-k, which is currently covered by grant funding but may be funded with referendum money in the future.
“In my mind, we’ve done a lot this year, but this would be for the next eight years,” Shuman pointed out. “I don’t know how much more we would add over our referendum time, except for instructional programming or extracurricular programming, and with those, there would be the potential of adding teachers if our numbers grow.”
Treasurer Casey Howard said the school corporation is trying to reserve about 30 percent of the referendum budget each year, in order to keep expenses funded if the referendum isn’t re-approved after the eight-year referendum period.
You can hear more from Monday’s work session this Sunday at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Kankakee Valley Viewpoints on our sister station, K99.3.
