THOMASVILLE- Last Tuesday, the Thomasville City School Board of Education held their first public hearing regarding the tentative FY24 budget and during a special called meeting approved a guaranteed maximum price of $53 million for their 6-12 school facility construction plan.

Interim Superintendent Dr. Fred Rayfield presented an overview and update of the tentative budget to the board, stating that the budget numbers he brought during the meeting were the same as the one presented in prior weeks.

“As far as the tentative budget itself, you take that one and lay it down beside the one you have from two weeks ago, or a week ago, the numbers are exactly the same, they have not changed,” Rayfield said.

Rayfield said that they were looking forward to having a CFO in place to take a real time approach to the budget, saying that right now the budget has a good framework and any issues can be handled through amendments once that position has been filled.

“I think the framework of this budget is good, but we’re going to safely get to over $300,000 worth personnel savings pretty quick, so that just starts to hopefully stack up on the backend,” he said. “I hate to phrase it that way, but we’re playing ball up here and we’re trying to clean up back here and start the stack back where it needs to be.”

Rayfield’s budget considerations presented to the board included numbers for the state health insurance increase, which amounts to a total of $2,042,160 increase for 268 certified employees and a total of $487,680 increase for 128 classified

employees.

The budget considerations also included state pay scale increase for certified and classified employees, technology costs, energy lease payment, the SSC custodial services increase, which will increase by 2% per contract, and a recommendation for taking $4,582,666 out of fund equity instead of the proposed $5.5 million.

According to the recommendation, $3 million would go toward the field house, furniture and equipment, while $1,582,866 would go toward balancing the 2024 fiscal year. Included in the recommendation was an estimate for the fund equity at a total of $6,417,134.

Additionally, the budget considerations noted that current staffing patterns throughout district office and schools are over budget and must be evaluated for savings in FY25 and informed the board that ESSER and CARES funds would be exhausted after this year.

Rayfield, in his budget considerations, once again recommended not taking a rollback rate in regard to the millage rate and mentioned that there was potential to gain revenue without raising taxes.

During the special called meeting, Rayfield spoke on the current proposed two year schedule and GMP of the extensive school building and renovation project would be.

“I think we’ve done an exceptional job with the guidance of Altman + Barrett and with Parrish in trying to get to a price that would get us to take action,” Rayfield said. “I feel good about the price that we have in front of us, I also feel good about the fact that we’re probably going to make some money at the end of this project, off of what you see on paper and I also think we’re going to bring some money in locally that’ll help us absorb a little extra to the reserve, because we need to go ahead and fund this project.”

Rayfield said that the proposed GMP of $53 million would mean that they would need to stay conscious of the cashflow, but said that Curt Eckman, project director, and Jeremy Bennett, VP of Operations, from Parrish Construction Group and Leah Jones, architect, from Altman + Barrett Architects had been doing a good job.

“These two guys have been doing some great work in concert with Leah,” he said.

Eckman said the current estimated price for the construction project grew due to the size and scope desired for the field house.

“With the desired field house, that number grew to $56,551,000,” said Eckman. “So from that point, today, Altman + Barrett’s recommendations and the things we’ve chased down, we’ve got that number to the $53,070,000 that you see today. There are $2.8 million worth of scope that we reduced out of the project and I think we’ve done a really good job to not impact the students’ life, how the school is gonna function, a lot of those things that you never really need on a day-to-day basis.”

He said that there was an additional $658,972 worth of savings due to the revised plan that reduced the duration of the construction project from 32 months to 23 months.

During the meeting, Eckman also spoke on the matter of disruption the two year construction plans would cause to the football season, with discussions with the board had on minimizing that disruption and alternatives.

After discussing the construction plan, the board entered into executive session to approve personnel recommendations, before exiting executive session and approving the GMP for the construction project at $53,070,070.

The next public hearing for the tentative FY24 budget will be held on July 20 at 8 a.m.