The next meeting of the Minooka CCSD 201 school board is Wednesday, September 28, 2011. The Committee of the Whole Meeting starts at 6:00 p.m. in the board room (the old library) at the Minooka Primary Center located at 305 Church Street in Minooka. The Committee of the Whole Meeting will be followed by a Budget Hearing at 6:45 p.m. in the gymnasium. The Budget Hearing will be followed by the regular Board Meeting at 7 p.m. Please be sure to mark your calendars. You can find the agenda for each of the meetings here.
The proposed budget for fiscal year 2011-2012 can be found here. The proposed budget shows deficits in a number of budget categories: Educational, Operations & Maintenance, Debt Service, Municipal Retirement/Social Security, and Capital Projects. Of these, the two operating funds, Educational and Operations & Maintenance, are the most critical. The proposed budget shows a deficit of $899,418 (or approximately 4%) in the Educational fund and a deficit of $714,200 (or approximately 33%) in the Operations & Maintenance fund. Current fund balances will only carry the district for a few years. So the choice facing the school board, like so many other government entities, will be to either cut expenditures or raise taxes and/or fees (or some combination of the two) in order to balance the budget over time.
