ELKINS — Randolph County Schools Superintendent Dr. Shawn Dilly presented actual staffing overage numbers to the Board of Education during this week’s meeting.

Dilly told BOE members Ed Daniels, Janey Newlon and Sherry Collett, who were present at the meeting, that the county is currently at 34.62 Professional Positions “over formula” and 26.85 for Service Positions.

“I wanted to kind of toss the money calculations to that because I don’t think people realize what we are facing,” Dilly said. “When using the calculation, on average, for our professional personnel with fixed cost is $77,000 annually. So when you equate that 34.62, it comes out to a little under $2.7 million we would have to address.

“With the service positions, it would total just under $1.2 million. That makes our total overage cost around $3.8 million, so this is one of the challenges we are going to have to be addressing during personnel season.”

Dilly told the Board that the approved school closures are going to save the county approximately $1.7 million, leaving the amount needed to balance the budget for the Fiscal Year 2027 at $2.2 million.

“All of it just points to some really tough decisions in front of us this spring when we get to personnel season,” Dilly said. “We will have to try and see where we can address the budget the best we can. We obviously will continue to try and limit costs through operational processes, but we know that the brunt of this is going to have to come from reductions in personnel.”

Dilly said he plans on meeting with the county’s school principals to discuss what positions would have the least impact on the system if they were eliminated.

Finance Director Brad Smith told the Board that he will provide some information at the next BOE meeting about changes that are being made at the state having to do with the budget system. Smith did, however, make an announcement about something that should help the District balance the budget for Fiscal Year 2027.

“The National Forest Secure Rural School funding is going to provide a couple hundred thousand (dollars) for us that I didn’t have for this year,” Smith said. “So that’s a positive.”

Dilly wanted to remind the public that there is still time to give feedback on the county running a bond or excess levy this year.

“We have kind of hit a stagnant spell with our survey, so we want to encourage folks to go back out there,” Dilly said. “I wanted to provide you an update on the current status and we are still currently sitting at roughly 340 responses. I would hope that we could get some more, but a lot of folks were focused on the holidays. Hopefully we can get some folks to look at this now.”

The survey can be found at boe.rand.k12.wv.us. The next Randolph County Board of Education meeting will be Jan. 20, beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the BOE Office.