The School Board of Alachua County reviewed federal, state and local funding projections, as well as facility improvement priorities, during a 2025-26 budget workshop on Wednesday. 

The district is projected to lose $10,739,776 in state funding compared to last year and gain $4,102,965 in local revenue. The current unfinalized estimate for incoming federal funding is around $34.5 million. 

The Florida Education Finance Program is expected to be the district’s largest loss, with a nearly $12 million difference between the two years. The Exceptional Student Education (ESE) Guaranteed Allocation looks to be the district’s biggest boost, at around $118,000 more than last year. 

Locally, the district is expected to gain around $3.5 million in District Required Local Effort funding from property taxes and around $45,000 from the One Mill tax, with a total capital transfer budget of around $17.4 million. 

Although the One Mill revenue is projected at $26 million, district staff said the number will change with the tax certifications on July 1 and July 19.  

The total expenditures are on track to be less than the revenues, with magnet programs ($7,650,509) and music and art ($5,325,326) having the largest price tags. They are the district’s largest expenditure increase compared to last year’s $2.2 million earmarked for classroom technology.

The budget also allocates $978,479 for teacher salary increases, but is also expected to fluctuate with the tax certifications. 

During Wednesday’s workshop, Board Chair Sarah Rockwell pointed out that the preliminary projections demonstrated the district underspent its One Mill funds during the 2024-25 school year.  

 Staff said that while the current numbers did reflect that, paychecks for teachers who chose a 24-month pay schedule still needed to be distributed for this year. They said the district also needed to build a reserve to account for the budgeting that’s coming from the general fund until the revenue comes in, as well as slowing property tax growth. 

Staff also said the reserves grew from less than half a million dollars last year to $2 million this year because of the cuts on librarians and guidance counselors between the general and One Mill funds. 

“This year, property taxes were at about 8%,” said Deborah Parrish, the district’s director of budgeting. “They’re projecting now it’s going to be at 4% this year. So you’re going to see those revenues start to even out. But then we have a governor, too, who wants to cut property taxes, and that will directly affect us, so we need to build this reserve now while we can.” 

Interim Superintendent Kamela Patton also said budgeting mistakes from last year came from over-projecting enrollment and not accounting for students who wouldn’t be counted in the district’s conservative budget model, such as students who moved to private schools.  

Patton said they’ve now accounted for 913 fewer kids so that the same mistake wouldn’t happen again this year. 

“We knew kids were going to [The Fraser School], we knew there were new grade levels being moved on, and we didn’t do anything,” she said. “But we’ve accounted for that this year.” 

Next year’s budget will also take into account priorities supported by capital funding sources from the facilities condition assessment, which was also presented at Wednesday’s workshop. Some of the priorities include the dismantling of the transition school at Littlewood Elementary, installing air conditioning in gyms and security upgrades. 

The assessment found Alachua County Public School’s 374 buildings’ current replacement value— the cost of construction in an area per square foot times the total square footage—to total over $2 billion.  

The district’s current needs across administration, athletic complexes and elementary through high schools totaled $307,743,260, causing the board to consider options, such as consolidating or even closing some facilities to balance maintenance versus replacement costs. 

Rockwell said the sheer number of laborers it would take to execute all the suggested improvements would be challenging enough to secure, let alone acquire the funds to complete the projects.  

She said the board would need to be transparent, strategic and collaborative as they looked to prioritize how to address the needs of student learning environments. 

“We need to include the community in those discussions and be really transparent in our data analysis for the objective and the subjective data,” she said. 

On Thursday, the Florida Legislature extended its session to June 18 to hammer out the state’s budget, which will run from July 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026. Once the budget is finalized, the legislature will wait 72 hours before taking a final vote and sending it to the governor for final review.