Parent Teacher Magazine Charlotte-Mecklenburg May/June 2015 | Page 4

CMS Superintendent, Ann Clark As I write this in the middle of April, we are beginning the process of gaining approval for the 20152016 operating budget for CharlotteMecklenburg Schools. It’s a process that takes about two months. In this column, I will share some information about how the budget moves from proposal to approval. I also want to provide you some context and explanation about our budget choices for the 2015-2016 year. This year, our county budget request is for $428.1 million, $39.9 million more than last year. We anticipate that our total operating budget for 2015-2016 will be $1.4 billion. Our annual operating budget is an expression of our commitment to providing an individualized, excellent learning experience for every student. First, the budget-approval process. It began in the middle of April with the submission of the superintendent’s proposed budget to the CharlotteMecklenburg Board of Education. I gave our Board my budget proposal on April 14 and the Board of Education is scheduled to approve our budget request on May 12. It’s called a budget request because in North Carolina, schools are dependently funded. That means we don’t raise revenue for ourselves. Instead, we receive somewhere between half and two-thirds of our operating money from the state (this year it’s about 56 percent) and slightly less than a third from the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners. The balance, (less than 10 percent) comes from federal and other sources. The General Assembly decides on the statewide amount of funding for schools, and most of it comes through the Department of Public Instruction. So we don’t control that funding. On the county side, we don’t control the funding either -- but we do have the opportunity each year to make the case for our needs with the Mecklenburg commissioners. Once the Board of Education approves our budget request, we send it over to the county and meet with county administrators and the commissioners in May to review it. Sometime in June, the county commission will approve the county budget, which contains the funding we’ll receive from the county. Final approval on the state budget comes in toward the end of the summer, sometimes even later. (Yes, that is after the start of the CMS fiscal year July 1. The budget calendars in our state