Financial News to Start the New Year

OVERTIME RULE CHANGES

Some of the new regulations that go into effect on January 1, 2020, include the new overtime compensation rules. The methodology for overtime doesn’t necessarily change, but the salary levels do. Remember that employees who make less than $646.00/week or $35,568.00/year are eligible to receive overtime. This sounds like an arbitrary number, but is the 20th percentile of all worker salaries.

This classification does come with some relief for educational entities. If an individual, such as a teacher, has professional discretion, that person does not receive overtime. However, it is important to define the role of central office staff and to monitor their duties and pay to ensure their duties aren't causing an issue with the district’s finances. It is important that you have a defined chain on overtime approval for your non-certified staff. If you have professional staff who serve in non-certified staff positions that are outside their professional duties, you might want to clarify their duties and any possible overtime issues.  

BOARD TRAINING

On December 2, 2019, OPSRC registered with the SDE all completed online board trainings and in-person board training points completed since August for the fall election cycle. We sent documentation to each superintendent on the number of points along with a certificate showing the training date. If you have board members who did not receive points they should have, please contact me so we can rectify the situation. We keep both electronic and paper copies of certificates, and we are responsible for verifying that a board member completed training, just as other organizations are responsible for maintaining a record of point completions for their organizations.    

Additionally, we've added a training that addresses activity fund policies and procedures to our online platform (NextThought). This course is available to both board and staff members. We will be revising several existing board trainings over the spring and adding a few more new ones. Our goal is to have 20 hours of board training on the site by April 1, 2020. Each training is at least one Carnegie Unit, which we will send to the SDE as documentation of board training. If there is an area in which you would like training for your board, we will do our best to develop it. The activity fund training is an example of such a development.    

STATE AID AUDITS

Media outlets have been running the news that the state auditor and inspector’s office completed the Western Heights Public Schools' State Aid audit from 2004 to 2014. It’s important to clarify this was an audit that Western Heights requested to determine the revenue they did not receive due to a State Aid miscalculation. This wasn’t due to an issue at Western Heights. We are studying the audit language and findings to determine if there is any net effect for other districts .

We will publish the State Board of Equalization numbers after their meeting. At this point, collections are at or above expectations in most funds. The post-holiday numbers will be important for the health of the state's General Fund and the 1017 Fund due to the dependence on state sales tax, which has been slipping downward.