Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

During its work session Tuesday night, the Austin School Board approved the district’s budget for the 2025-26 school year.

The board settled on a General Fund Expense Budget of just over $96.8 million for the upcoming school year, representing a 5% increase from the previous year. According to Executive Director of Finance and Operations Todd Lechtenberg, the budget comes with built-in increases for salary and benefit increases for staff as well as some inflationary increases on supplies and benefits along with budgeted projects like renovation of Hastings Gym at Austin High School and Paulson Courts.

The General Fund itself is how the district pays for a vast majority of its day-to-day operations.

While Lechtenberg said that the district tries to keep increases of this fund at around 3-4%, 5% is still considered a reasonable increase.

“We’re very comfortable with our budget,” he said. “We’re comfortable with our numbers.”

The route to get to this point wasn’t all smooth sailing, however. The Minnesota State Legislature failed to get its own budget resolved by the end of its session, requiring a special session to get it across the finish line.

It left APS in a vulnerable state with various unknowns on the table and some guess work. 

An example of this was a reduction in compensatory aid that originally would have cut revenue to the district by $1.1 million, however, changes during the special section cut that down to just $277,000. It was a swing of $900,000 that could have been an even larger question for the district to answer.

Another change came much later when the district found out this past Friday that an increase in the Teacher Retirement Account from 8.75% to 9.5% was actually a swing to 9.81%, an impact of $115,000.

“Our staff had to redo all of our staffing plans Friday afternoon,” Lechtenberg said.

Still, the district was able to go into the process with some assumptions including state formula per student increased to $7,480 representing a 2.74% increase, a reduction of Special Education Transportation revenue reduction to 95%, a loss of School Library aid to the tune of $31,537 and drop in the district’s overall estimated enrollment.

“Those are little things that add up, plus we graduated one of our largest classes and replaced it with a much smaller class in the kindergarten,” Board Chair Carolyne Dube said.

Another impact the district will have to absorb in the coming year will be the start of Minnesota Paid Leave, which starts on Jan. 1, 2026, and will have an estimated impact of $150,000 on the district.

And still waiting in the wings is the unknown surrounding Title II and Title III funding.

“Money is still sitting at the federal level and the state estimated it so we can submit our budget,” Lechtenberg said. “We’re still waiting for it to be allocated.”

“As much as we’ve been informed by the (Minnesota Department of Education), that money is already ear marked and allocated,” He added. 

Part of Lechtenberg’s presentation to the board Tuesday night was the creation of a pair of new assigned funds that the district intends to use as something of a rainy day fund in the future. $750,000 will be set aside each for technology and curriculum.

One of those expected costs on the curriculum side will be for the implementation of a new math curriculum in a couple years. The technology fund will be used for any unexpected cost hits so money doesn’t have to come out of day-to-day operations.

Overall, APS’s unassigned fund balance is decreasing some, but still hovers over its own self-set mark of 8.33% at 12%.

What this year’s budget comes down to is an effort to set the district up for the future, with Lechtenberg pointing out that even with some of the increases and decreases the district is still good.

“The biggest thing is, the fund balance is going down a little bit, but the district is investing in its staff and facilities and trying to set itself up for the future,” he said. “APS is in great shape. We’re still above our fund balance and we have a great staff.”

“Anything we don’t put into an assigned bucket comes out of our unassigned funds,” Dube said. “It’s never bad to have a little bit of preparedness.”

Also approved was the Food Service budget at $4.74 million and the Community Service budget, which was approved at $2.7 million.