Cloquet School Board sets budget in wake of cuts

It’s been four years since Covid-19 threw schools into disarray, and enrollment in Cloquet has still not bounced back.

Even with more severe staffing cuts this spring than usual, on June 10 Cloquet School Board members approved a general fund budget for the 2024-25 school year that was approximately $88,000 in the red, with general fund revenues projected at $35,638,978 and expenditures of $35,727,681. The unassigned general fund is where most of the district’s payroll and day-to-day money comes from, versus specialized funds for transportation, facilities maintenance, food service and community education, for example.

Cloquet business manager Candace Nelis noted the budget for next year is very tentative at this point, explaining the board will revise its budget in October based on more solid numbers. They built in a 10 percent increase in supplies and a 14 percent increase in insurance, to be safe. And predicted lower student numbers than this year.

“We’re just not seeing the same birth rates and incoming kindergarten sizes as we’ve seen historically,” Superintendent Michael Cary said.

He pointed out that although there’s a deficit, it’s substantially less than usual.

“In the past, we also used to be pretty comfortable historically carrying what I would call a projected deficit of $250,000 to $350,000 going into the next year,” Cary said, explaining that much of that deficit would disappear once the actual numbers come through. “This is, I think, the smallest projected deficit we’ve ever brought to the board.”

If that happens and there’s a surplus, that’s good. Cary said he’d like to see the district’s fund balance grow, after several years of deficit spending.

“You have a fund balance for the purpose of absorbing things sometimes when the years don’t go perfectly, but at the same time [that] we’re shrinking our fund balance, our budgets are going up, just from annual inflationary increases,” he said. “So the percent of the total budget we have in reserve is actually decreasing.”

Not having adequate reserves in the future could impact the school district’s financial rating.

“We just have to be careful that we don’t keep whittling that [reserve percentage] down, because it could lead to increased borrowing costs,” Cary said.

Election news

In other matters, three school board seats — currently held by Melissa Juntunen, Nate Sandman and Ken Scarbrough — will be up for reelection in November.

The candidate filing period for that non-primary election is July 30-Aug. 13. Candidates will file at the central administration office on the second floor of the Garfield School. There’s a $2 filing fee.

Editor's note: General fund figures were corrected after publication. The original numbers were incorrect due to reporter error.