By NOAH WORTHAM | Staff Writer

The Shelby County Schools Board of Education recently passed a $343 million budget for the 2024 fiscal year.

The Shelby County Schools BOE approved the FY24 budget during a regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 12. The budget includes $343,047,752.80 in total expenditures and $318,617,812.94 in total revenues.

“We have a considerable amount of new funding sources coming in from the state that we’re having to balance and see where we can find the best use of those,” said John Gwin, assistant superintendent of finance for the SCSBOE. “This is the last year in 2024, of working on our ESSER 3 funds, AARP funds. So, we’re trying to make sure that we’re spending that in the best way we need to because we know that money is not going to be around in 2025.”

Gwin shared that the board begins early in the year working on the next fiscal year’s budget.

“Every single year we start working on the budget in February,” Gwin said. “After staffing, we have department meetings, evaluate what are the key priorities we need to do—what are the things we need to repeat what are the things we need to go away from—and so, we’ll go through and we’ll compile that.”

During the budget presentation, the board was provided the following breakdown of expenditures by function:

• Instruction: $136,621,686.10
• Instructional support: $40,664,997.23
• Operations: $27, 895, 541.35
• Auxiliary: $18,895,729.82
• Administrative: $5,715,390.55
• Capital Outlay: $19,959,697
• Other: $4,456.575.66

This year, the board is planning on using approximately $19.8 million from its General Fund to go towards Capital Projects which will bring upgrades and improvements to the system’s schools.

“These will be paid from State Funds we received in FY2023 from the Education Trust Fund Supplemental Appropriation and General Fund, Local Reserves,” Gwin said.

The board also has $20.1 million budgeted in its Capital Projects Fund to complete ongoing projects that are already in the works and to continue the next phase of its Capital Campaign.

“We are using State and Local Bond proceeds as well as funds from Local City Partnerships to pay for these projects,” Gwin said.

The following is a breakdown of the Capital Projects fund expenditures:

• Additions: $16,198,530.80
• Vehicles: $4,196,835.44
• Renovations: $3,498,797
• Paving: $438,551

After passing the budget in its Sept. 12 meeting, the board also approved a revised salary schedule which includes a 2% raise that was approved by the state’s legislature for all salary schedules.