School board keeps tax rate level

The Kimball Board of Education held its first regular meeting with new members Heather Norberg and Carrie Tabor on Monday night.

Norberg and Tabor were chosen to replace former board members Jared Schnell and Theresa Keller, who both resigned last month as they each moved out of the district.

The board held a public hearing for the 2015-2016 budget and another to set the final tax request for the coming fiscal year, neither of which were attended by any members of the public.

“As we are putting this together we are building our needs and then we come back to ask for the tax to support that need,” Superintendent Marshall Lewis said. “One of our key points of concern as we were looking at this was to maintain the tax rate where it was. We did not want to do an increase.”

The money the district receives will be a higher amount, even though the levy request was not increased. This is due to a rise in valuations in Kimball County.

“We do budget to expend pretty much all of our funds in all of the different departments, with the exception of what we leave in the necessary cash reserves,” said Harold Farrar, the district’s business manager. “It is kind of a worst case scenario. We do not have plans to spend that amount, but we need the authority to do that in case certain things happen.”

The budgeted expenditures for the coming fiscal year totals $10,721,381 and the available resources for the district total $5,134,142.00 with a cash reserve of $457,853.00.

The school district is requesting a total of $6,106,153.48. However, the tax levy remains $1.04, as it was last year.

The district plans to allot $250,000 into the special building fund, double the amount allotted in that fund last year.

“That goes to what our intent is,” Lewis explained. “Our intent is to bring our buildings into better condition, and to be aggressive with some of the things we are doing there.”

The board voted unanimously to accept the proposed budget and the final tax request for the coming fiscal year.

Additionally, board members were updated on the first measures taken to integrate more technology into the classrooms, recording teachers lessons for students out of the classroom.

“We are focusing on the core teachers at the high school this year,” said Jamie Soper, Kimball Public Schools special services director.

Trainings on recording and storing lessons will continue during the school year, Soper said. The technology committee proposed a set of goals, including providing three recorded lessons in the first quarter, five in the second, seven in the third and nine recordings in the final quarter of the year.

“To be honest with you, that will probably accelerate, although we started out by decelerating,” Lewis said. “We ran into fear, I think mostly because there is an impression that everyone is going to be doing this real elaborate media thing.”

While the goal is not to have the core high school teachers pull in flipped learning right away, it is to provide their lessons to students that were not able to attend that class.

“That apprehension is a big hurdle. It is something new, and even though we talked about it for quite awhile, at the beginning of this year we weren’t able to alleviate those,” Lewis concluded. “We want to make sure that those that aren’t as comfortable with it do not get left behind.”