School City of Hammond says it won't rely on short-term borrowing to make ends meet in 2025.
The school corporation borrowed $16 million in tax anticipation and tuition advancement warrants this year. That allows it to have enough cash on hand to pay its bills until it gets its regular distributions of property tax revenues and state tuition support.
Chief Financial Officer Eric Kurtz told the school board last week that the district was charged $726,398 in interest for that borrowing. "We are not taking any tax anticipation or tuition anticipation warrants for 2025," Kurtz added. "The plan is to use our funds internally to deal with the ebb and flow of the settlement of the property tax payments."
Board member Cindy Murphy commended district leaders, saying this will be the first time that she can remember in many years that the district won't be using these warrants to pay its bills. "Job well done, everybody, on getting this district back on the fiscal that it needed to get to," Murphy said. "There were some tough cuts, but it's getting us to where we needed to be."
But with cash balances still low in many funds, Michaela Spangenberg with the Gary Education Coalition questioned how the change would actually work. "Is it really that the plan going forward is to not use tax anticipation warrants, or is it really that the plan going forward is that there is no plan going forward?" Spangenberg asked.
She worried that, without a solid plan, school leaders would be setting the incoming school board members up for failure.
Meanwhile, resident Wanda Puckett called for the school corporation to find money to resume bus transportation, at least for part of the year. "You can just give it to them for the six months that we're out there in the cold, walking to school," Puckett told the school board. "That's all I'm asking for, because there's going to be sleet, ice on that ground."
She told board members that middle and high school students are often late to class because they're walking their younger siblings to elementary schools.
