LADY BUDGETDOWN: PORTAGE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
BUDGET SAID ONE THING. THE AUDITS SAID ANOTHER.
Dear readers, Lady Budgetdown opened five years of Portage Public Schools budgets and audited financial statements.
And after lining them up, the spectacles stayed on. 👓
From FY2020–21 through FY2024–25, Portage began every year with an original General Fund budget projecting a deficit.
Every. Single. Year.
And when the books were closed?
Every one of those five years ended with an audited General Fund surplus.
📖 THE FIVE-YEAR LEDGER:
2020–21
Original budget: −$482,526
Audited actual: +$3,509,166
2021–22
Original budget: −$718,175
Audited actual: +$1,763,190
2022–23
Original budget: −$798,614
Audited actual: +$6,555,473
2023–24
Original budget: −$1,662,657
Audited actual: +$4,848,010
2024–25
Original budget: −$2,312,354
Audited actual: +$3,901,334
Now let Lady Budgetdown's little magic number machine add those columns. 🧮
Combined original budget projections:
−$5,974,326
Combined audited results:
+$20,577,173
Difference between what was originally budgeted and what ultimately occurred:
$26,551,499.
And there is another number worth putting beside it.
Portage's General Fund balance was $10,475,284 at June 30, 2020.
By June 30, 2025:
$31,052,457.
That's an increase of $20,577,173 over five years.
Now, before anyone reaches for the fainting couch, this does NOT mean Portage secretly discovered $26.5 million beneath a schoolhouse floor. 😏
The audits provide perfectly ordinary reasons for portions of these differences: actual salaries and benefits below budget, purchased services and other expenditures below projections, grants and categorical funding, property-tax revenue, interest revenue and other year-end differences between estimates and actual activity.
Budgets are estimates.
Audits tell us what actually happened.
But that is precisely why Lady Budgetdown finds the five-year pattern interesting.
One year of conservative budgeting?
Nothing particularly remarkable.
Two?
Still perfectly explainable.
But five consecutive original budgets forecasting General Fund deficits...
followed by five consecutive audited surpluses?
That earns a question in the ledger:
At what point does consistently conservative budgeting become a forecasting pattern worth explaining to taxpayers?
No accusations.
No claim that anything improper occurred.
Just five budgets, five audits, and one rather persistent question sitting between them. 👓📖
And dear readers, we're keeping Portage's bond money out of this particular ledger on purpose.
Those dollars deserve their own set of spectacles.
That receipt comes next. 👑
With receipts & respect.
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