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The Higley Unified School District Governing Board passed its fiscal year 2024-25 budget with little fanfare June 26.
The board voted 4-0, with Board Member Tiffany Shultz absent, to approve a $128.06 million maintenance and operations budget and a $15.33 million unrestricted capital budget.
Like Gilbert Public Schools one night before, the final approved Higley USD budget comes with more certainty than the preliminary approval from earlier in the month, the result of the Arizona Legislature completing its work for the current session and passing a state budget.
That budget allows districts to receive a 2% inflation adjustment to its base support level for students in the maintenance and operations budget, which pays for day-to-day operations of the district, including most salaries.
The legislature increased District Additional Assistance by 4.62%, Chief Financial Officer Tyler Moore said, but made it a one-time increase rather than an ongoing increase to the base, which will have ramifications on the 2025-26 budget.
DAA is the funding mechanism for the capital budget, which pays for items like buildings, maintenance, buses and technology.
“What that means is we will see the increase in (fiscal year) ‘25, but immediately in ‘26 that will come off our budgets,” Moore said. “We'll already start to see a capital reduction. It seems like just a recurring thing. Unfortunately I felt like we were just emerging out of this but now we'll see a capital reduction in ‘26 unless additional legislation changes that in the ‘25 year.”
The district is budgeting for a loss of 100 students in average daily membership, which is the total enrollment of fractional students and full-time students, minus withdrawals, of each school day through the first 100 days of the school year. It is a key figure in the state’s education funding formula.
Despite that, the M&O budget is an increase of $1.94 million from the revised fiscal year 2023-24 budget, in part because of the increased base level support but also because the district budgeted for a smaller transfer from the M&O budget to the capital budget for the coming fiscal year.
That amount, which is to cover the district’s middle school leases, is going from $5.6 million to $3.55 million.
The smaller transfer, however, is helping drive a decrease in the capital budget of $10.74 million. Also at play is large draw-down of budget balance carry forward to pay for capital projects as the district is without bond money.
But the district likely will not further touch its budget balance carry forward as it is now down to about $4 million where previously it had been more than $10 million, Moore said.
“Within the capital budget typically if there’s an emergency, you’re going to have a larger expense,” he said. “If it’s a building emergency, you're going to have larger expense than M&O per se. We’ll want to keep a contingency in there for those emergencies.”
Moore also showed the average teacher salary falling from $65,802 to $64,521 despite an increase in pay for teachers. He said the retirements of some highly experienced teachers have resulted in a decrease of nearly half a year or 4.9% in average teacher experience, leading the decrease.
He also noted the average does not take into account supplemental pay.
Moore also addressed Higley’s portion of the Qasimyar lawsuit against Maricopa County. The successful lawsuit against the county had to do with how certain properties were classified for property tax purposes, and its effects are hitting school districts and municipalities all over the county.
However, Higley’s portion of the settlement is $3.5 million, and Moore said he found the district had enough “excess” levy collection on hand to cash pay the district’s portion and spare property owners a resolution for a tax increase to pay for it.
We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on X.
Raised in Arizona, Tom Blodgett has spent more than 35 years in journalism in Arizona and joined Independent Newsmedia in July 2022 to launch the Gilbert edition. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication from 2005-19 and remains editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet.
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