Randolph BOE approves budget with $430K ‘negative contingency’
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ELKINS -- At a special meeting on Thursday evening, the Randolph County Board of Education voted unanimously to approve a budget for the next school year including a "negative contingency" of $434,388.
On May 15, the BOE had decided to report to the state that the county school system will not be able to balance its budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
During Thursday's meeting, Brad Smith, the Randolph County Schools' treasurer and director of finance and purchasing, told the BOE members that, "Under the general fund, you will find that we did budget a negative contingency of $434,388. That's what we need to work to resolve. The state is going to be very much concerned about that."
Smith said he had sent the BOE members a document containing "some areas, and what type of savings you can get under those particular areas," adding he hoped he and the BOE could work together to try to find ways to cut down that $434,388 total in the near future.
"This budget is the leanest version of the budget," Smith said Thursday evening.
The BOE's budget statement for the 2025-26 fiscal year, submitted this week as a legal advertisement to The Inter-Mountain, shows, under the general current expense fund, total estimated revenues of $43,653,164, and total estimated expenditures of $43,653,164.
In the statement, the $434,388 total is listed as "estimated budgetary reserves."
"I'm more than happy to speak with anyone that can contact me, come in and I'll sit down with them, and go through the budget line by line. Anything that anyone would need, I can do that," Smith said at Thursday's special meeting.
"Our biggest issue right now is that we've got to get this hole that we have in the budget filled," Smith added, saying he and Superintendent Dr. Shawn Dilly will be looking at ways to cut expenses in the coming weeks.
"Tonight we're asking you to approve this, so the state can know what's in it," Smith told the BOE members. "That way I can hit tomorrow's deadline for the budget with the state, and we'll be compliant there."
All five BOE members -- Rachel Anger, Phil Chua, Janie Newlon, Sherri Collett and Ed Daniels -- then voted to approve the budget.
Earlier this year, Dilly presented a long list of RIF (reduction in force) termination and transfer recommendations to the BOE, seeking to have a balanced budget for the upcoming school year. In March, Board of Education members voted to table the RIF votes until April.
On April 22, the BOE voted to terminate 29 professional staff positions, and four service personnel jobs during the final RIF meeting. The BOE also voted to save 13 professional staff positions that were on the termination list.
However, some of the BOE's personnel votes did not comply with state personnel laws, and on May 15, board members voted 5-0 to rescind 33 original termination and transfer decisions they had made on April 22. Dilly warned at the time that the BOE's decisions would likely result in the state stepping in to oversee the Randolph County school system in some manner.
The RIF recommendations came about after Dilly proposed last fall the closing of the Harman and Pickens K-12 schools as a budgetary measure.
The BOE voted in January to not close the Harman School, and Dilly immediately dropped the Pickens closure proposal, warning county employees that positions would have to be eliminated in order to balance the budget.
The next Randolph County Board of Education meeting will be Tuesday, June 3 at 5:30 p.m.