ANCHOR BAY SCHOOL DISTRICT: FIVE YEARS OF AUDITS & BUDGETS
After looking at Anchor Bay's 10-year financial picture, Lady Budgetdown went one layer deeper, but kept this rabbit hole intentionally narrow.
I reviewed the district's five most recent audited fiscal years, 2020–21 through 2024–25, along with the corresponding General Fund budgets.
And one trend is difficult to miss.
💰 GENERAL FUND BALANCE
2020–21: $2.97 million
2021–22: $7.08 million
2022–23: $11.12 million
2023–24: $14.00 million
2024–25: $19.43 million
That's an increase of approximately $16.46 million in five years.
Anchor Bay also recorded a positive General Fund result in every one of those five audited years.
But Lady Budgetdown noticed something else.
📊 THE AUDITED RESULTS BEAT THE FINAL BUDGET - EVERY YEAR
2020–21: about $513,000 better
2021–22: about $673,000 better
2022–23: about $1.19 million better
2023–24: about $1.22 million better
2024–25: about $1.72 million better
That's not automatically evidence of poor budgeting. In fact, Anchor Bay's audit discusses conservative expenditure budgeting and identifies reasons certain expenditures came in below estimates.
But when the same pattern occurs five years in a row, it's worth putting on the ledger.
There is also an important receipt attached to 2024–25: the district reports that its approximately $5.43 million increase in General Fund balance was helped by the roughly $2.8 million sale of Sugarbush Elementary, along with increased grant funding and lower retirement expenditures.
So Lady Budgetdown isn't going to pretend the entire 2024–25 increase came from ordinary operations.
That's why we read the footnotes. 😉
The larger five-year picture remains:
📈 General Fund balance: $2.97M → $19.43M
✅ Five consecutive positive General Fund results
📊 Five consecutive years in which audited results finished better than the final budget projection
No conclusions need to be manufactured from that.
Those are simply the district's own numbers.
And now that we've looked at the money, the next question is a familiar one:
What happened to staffing while all of this was happening?
With receipts and respect,
👑 Lady Budgetdown
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