Jul. 19—The Mesa Public Schools Governing Board has passed a budget that far exceeded anyone's most optimistic expectations, leaving members to figure how to spend a surplus that no one ever anticipated.
"Our very conservative estimates," said Scott Thompson, assistant superintendent of business services, "were very much wrong."
The district cautiously budgeted for an increase of $88 per student for the upcoming school year. Instead, the Legislature appropriated a portion of the state's $5-billion surplus for K-12 schools — which for Mesa means instead of an $88-per-student increase from 2021-22, the figure jumps to $384 for the new school year.
"Unprecedented. Pretty amazing," Thompson said.
"Very exciting," said Ken Alexander, MPS chief financial officer. "I'm very excited by this opportunity and looking forward to seeing what great things we can do with this extra money.
"I think most of us would be shocked because we really had no idea which way this was going because there we lots of moving parts with it."
For the first time, the MPS budget is topping half a billion dollars — 515 million, to be exact. That's not rhetoric. It's the real number of unrestricted dollars that the schools will work with.
That includes an increase of $32.6 million in the maintenance and operations fund, which covers most day-to-day operations, including salaries, and a $3-million boost for capital projects.
There will be plenty of competing interests and opinions on how the surplus should be spent, but there seems to be a general consensus that the money should find its way to the classroom in one way or another.
"We want to get teacher salaries up, competitive. We tried to address this even before we knew this was happening," Thompson said. "We were out on a 4% increase. Most districts weren't.
So, we've been trying to be aggressive in that area."
Thompson speculated aloud, when asked, that the increase in teacher salaries could potentially make Mesa schools more competitive in the race to lure and hire teachers.
Board member Marcie Hutchinson, for one, hopes so.
She seized the moment even before the budget was formally adopted to remind her fellow board members that the board should take advantage of "one of the strongest labor markets we've seen in decades," she said.
"In order to serve our children, we have to have our best professionals in the classroom with them," she said. "It's the people who make the difference in the classroom. One of the issues that keeps me up at night is vacancies and making sure that our children are served by the best people possible."