OKEECHOBEE — One woman who attended the Town Hall meeting held by School Superintendent Dylan Tedders on Wednesday, Sept. 23, wanted to know if declining enrollment played a part in the district’s budget as well as any fees issued by the school district. Specifically, she mentioned the fees that children enrolled in private schools must pay to participate in sports.

At the June meeting of the Okeechobee County School Board, the board voted and passed a policy that allows the school district to charge an activity fee for private school students to participate in athletics programs. The fee can be up to, but no more than $400.

Superintendent Tedders first took a few minutes to explain that the budget itself is based on an enrollment projection before school begins. Then in October a count must be submitted and if the district is over the predicted number of students, it will receive more money, but if the number of students is less than the predicted amount, money will be taken away.

This year it was initially projected that enrollment would be down 170 students.

Tedders also explained that the budget is based on how many students are physically in public school seats. In other words, private school children don’t count towards enrollment numbers. Nor do homeschooled students.

“There’s this little piece out there too,” he said. “And that’s the FES. It’s the scholarships.”

The Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) is a state-funded program that helps private school students K-12. Tedders says the state gives the district around $ 6 million for those scholarships based on how many students they predict will receive it.

“But the last two years they have exceeded the pot of money set aside for them,” Tedders explained. “So in March we’ve had to pay back anywhere from $1.2 to $1.8 million because that’s how many more students have taken that scholarship than what they projected. And we have no way of tracking that because we don’t know these kids that have never enrolled with us.”

Tedders went on to explain that when they budget, they have to keep that unpredictable number in mind because in March they will get the bill for it and they have been “burned” by it in previous years.

“We did a lot of work in our budget this year trying to clean up the difference between expenses and revenue,” he said. “Expenses continue to rise but the money the state is giving us continues to decline. So how do we manage that?”

Tedders said this year they have made cuts to the ESE and behavior departments to try and make up some the difference.

When addressing the athletic fees he said, “Athletic expenses continue to go up. That legislation came out pretty late and had a June 30^th deadline. I had to make a pretty quick decision whether I was going to bring it to the board or not. A bus trip alone out of town is anywhere from $250 to $500. This was an opportunity for me to try and get a little bit of that. Private school kids aren’t in our seats. Kids in our seats go in the pot of money I can spend on coaches and gas and things like that.”

Another thing to note, as mentioned in the story “School could require private school students to pay athletic fee” published on June 17 by Lake Okeechobee News, is that if the board had chosen not to pass the policy for the athletic fees, they would not be able to change that decision in the future should the need for the fees arise. Whatever decision they made was final unless the legislation is changed again.