Montgomery ISD adopts balanced, $79.5M budget

For the past year, the Montgomery ISD board of trustees have made balancing the district’s spending and improving employee salaries a priority.

At their June 29 meeting, the board adopted a balanced, $79.5 million budget at the for the district’s upcoming fiscal year, which begins July 1. The budget includes $75.9 million in district general fund revenues and $79.3 million in spending, as well as $4.6 million in student nutrition fund spending with $4.7 million in revenues and $23.6 million in debt service fund spending and $24.1 million in revenues. A school district’s debt service fund pays principal and interest for district debt used for new facilities and facilities upgrades, according to a news release from MISD.

Local funding makes up the bulk of MISD’s general fund revenues, at 84.59%, state funding makes up 13.65% and federal funding accounts for 1.76%, said Kris Lynn, MISD assistant superintendent of finance and operations.

The adoption of the budget also finalizes the raises approved by trustees in a recent district compensation plan, which included $3.8 million in salary and stipend increases across employee groups, according to the MISD news release. Trustees had approved several additional raises in October 2020 and April. From the 2020-21 school year to the start of the 2021-22 school year, teachers will have received about a 7% total pay increase, with other employee groups receiving a 5% raise. The first-year teacher salary also increased from $51,000 to $54,450.

Throughout the school year, Lynn and MISD Superintendent Heath Morrison held town hall meetings with district staff and stakeholders to solicit feedback from the public and provide updates.

“This in some ways the most boring thing that we should be presenting to this year and the most exciting,” Morrison said. “It’s the most exciting because it’s the budget, it reflects our priorities, it reflects how we have been entrusted by the community to use the resources on behalf of our students and staff ... it’s the most boring thing because there should be absolutely nothing that you have not seen, heard, had an opportunity to provide input for, and quite frankly, anyone in the community has had multiple opportunities to provide input, and that is by design.”

The next steps are to adopt a tax rate, which will occur in August or September, district officials said. ESSER funding, or funding to address learning loss, will be discussed in August.