In addition to addressing how the district will respond to cuts in state spending, the Pella School Board also received the Certified Annual Report at Monday’s meeting. The yearly report is a breakdown of the district’s finances.

“That is determined by what we call the undesignated, unreserved fund balance in the general fund, and that’s probably the most critical piece of the financial puzzle,” said Pella Schools Superintendent Mark Wittmer. “In our particular case, we ended the year with $1,683,000 in that undesignated, unreserved fund balance.”

Wittmer says while that is certainly a lot of money, it would only cover around a month and a half worth of expenses for the district; which has a budget of around $19 million. He adds that normally having that amount of money in its undesignated, unreserved fund would come as welcome news.

“It’s still about exactly where all the financial experts recommend where schools be; so we felt very good about that. Obviously the problem is that it won’t take long this year with the ten percent across-the-board cut for the district to eat into an awful lot of that, so it’s kind of a good news, bad news scenario.”

The cut in state spending equates to approximately $994,000 less that the district will be receiving from the state this year.