LOGAN — The Logan-Hocking School District released its 2024 fiscal year end-of-year report late last month. The following information encompasses July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.
Here are some of the critical takeaways:
After operating at over a $500,000 deficit in 2023, 2024 was a sound year for the district, as it found itself at a $475,000 surplus. The district ended the year with a carry-over cash balance of over $11 million.
Partially to explain: operational revenues for the district increased 7% from 2023 to 2024, while its expenditures increased only 5.1%.
The current cash balance for the district — “60 true days cash,” explained treasurer Paul Shaw — narrowly meets the district’s two–month target for this figure.
FY 2024 was in line with the district’s typical operation in the last 30 years, as it has worked with a surplus in 23 of those years.
Shaw noted that reliance on local taxpayers has increased dramatically from 33% in 2005 to 46% in 2024, and “current legislative changes in the school’s funding formula will more than likely result in greater reliance on local taxpayers” in the future, due to “increased local wealth.”
While the district’s funding sources lean more and more local rather than state, Shaw pointed out that the last operating tax levy passed by district voters was in November 1981, nearly 43 years ago — “almost unheard of in the state of Ohio.”
While FY 2024, and four out of the five years since the pandemic, have had LHSD operating at a net surplus, Shaw raised concern about future financial challenges for the district. An operating deficit is forecasted for 2025 and the years following, as noted in a July meeting of the school board to address oncoming enrollment drop-off.
“The projected net loss for 2026 is projected to land at over $1.5 million,” an article from the Logan Daily News said at the time. “In 2028, that figure grows to over $2 million. With that, its expected cash balance is set to fall… to just over $4.5 million by the end of fiscal year 2028.”
With that in mind, Shaw said in his end-of-year report that LHSD will need to be “leaner and meaner” over the next few years “as future finding tightens up and federal assistance relating to COVID is phased out.”
As the district looks forward to “leaner and meaner” years, changes seem to be on the horizon. The school board meeting in July, again, provides some sense of what that might entail.
The report brought by Shaw back at that meeting noted that personnel makes up 85% of the district’s total expenditures, and that if “reductions in staffing are not made, the district’s financial condition will deteriorate materially.”
The district has also discussed redistricting scenarios for LHSD’s elementary schools, which remain up for discussion, as nothing is set in stone. Perhaps the most dramatic of these scenarios would involve the outright closure or repurposing of Hocking Hills Elementary, and the re-shuffling of its 123 students, mostly to Chieftain Elementary.
This issue is likely to be among those discussed at a community information session, scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday in the Logan High School lecture hall.
Email at rmorris@logandaily.com
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