This episode features Madison's Deputy Superintendent, Lori Garvey. Ms. Garvey has over 30 years of experience in Arizona public schools and holds an MBA. She has served in the Madison Elementary School District for the past 13 years and brings a deep understanding of both the financial and instructional workings of a school district. She successfully guided Madison through challenging budget reductions and has implemented strategies to ensure long-term fiscal stability. This episode discusses school funding and finance.
This episode features Madison's Deputy Superintendent, Lori Garvey. Ms. Garvey has over 30 years of experience in Arizona public schools and holds an MBA. She has served in the Madison Elementary School District for the past 13 years and brings a deep understanding of both the financial and instructional workings of a school district. She successfully guided Madison through challenging budget reductions and has implemented strategies to ensure long-term fiscal stability. This episode discusses school funding and finance.
Nicole Rodriguez: Welcome to parenting Future Focused Kids. I'm excited to be joined by Madison Deputy Superintendent Lori Garvey. Ms. Garvey has over 30 years of experience in Arizona public schools and holds an MBA. She has served in the Madison Elementary School District for the past 13 years and brings a deep understanding of both the financial and instructional workings of a school district. She successfully guided Madison through challenging budget reductions and has implemented strategies to ensure long term fiscal stability. Today, we will talk with Ms. Garvey to learn more about school funding and finance. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Ms. Garvey. We're really excited to talk about school finance and just really dive into what it's all about. It can be a pretty complicated subject, and we're really excited to learn more. So thank you so much for being here today.
Lori Garvey: Well, you're welcome.
NR: So jumping right into it, tell us about why you're so passionate about finance and public education specifically.
LG: Sure. I think for me, it's always been such a high value and belief that I have in education and our children. And so when I could actually marry that up with my finance background to see how I could help and move forward school systems from the budget side and the funding side, I just it's been a dream for me to be able to do those two.
NR: And I feel like most people, when they think they might not think about the finance side and that there's so many people who help support our school systems in that way. When you think about public education, maybe that's not the first thought. And really, school finance is an integral part of keeping our schools successful and our students successful. So we know that this can be complicated, though it's not really easy to understand, or at least it's not for me. Can you provide a brief overview of school funding sources for those who are listening?
LG: The schools receive their funding through a variety of sources. We get some of our funds through state moneys. We get a lot from our property tax owners within the district. In addition, we do receive federal grants and state grants. So and then of course, we have some ancillary funds that do come in where it's just individuals or organizations that can actually donate to school districts. But the bulk of our funding does come from state moneys, the property tax and then federal grants.
NR: So I think that's a good way to kind of break it down to see our maybe umbrella of where the funding sources come from. So I know it helps for me to think about our funding sources as being in different buckets because each bucket can be spent on different things. So can you tell us a little bit about each bucket and maybe what it's used for in the school district?
LG: We as a school district have different buckets that we can put the money in. Our largest bucket is our maintenance and operations, otherwise known as M&O funding. That goes to pay the daily operations of the schools. So it covers things like salaries and benefits, gasoline, electricity, classroom supplies, things that are used within a year and that are part of our daily operations. Our next large fund is our capital fund. Now, capital fund can be spent on generally on items that are larger in value and have a life of over a year. Some examples of that would be technology, printers or a bus. Typically you can see that those cost more and you don't just use them in one school year. They live on for quite a few school years. Then the other thing though, that that is within capital are textbooks and instructional aids. So curriculum does fall under that. Now, generally, textbooks do last obviously over time, which is why they become part of capital. Then we have our bond fund. Money that is raised through the bonds needs to stay in the bond fund and it funds major items similar to capital, but things that really are going to exist for a long time, such as a school. So, they can rebuild schools. They can build schools, they can replace major systems within a school that would typically last longer than even four or five years. Things like air conditioning systems. Our busses can be paid out of bond. Their life should be probably ten years plus as well. So and it can only be spent. And I think I need to mention this because this is a lot of questions that I do actually receive is, “Well, why can't we - we're building a school, but - why can't we pay teachers more?” and it's because of the rules around and the restrictions around the money that we get. So that's just it's very important to manage our buckets and to see how we can utilize all the buckets to provide the best for our students.
NR: Yeah, I think that's a really important point and that we can't unfortunately, due to rules, move money from different buckets. So we're always looking at how do we spend this in a wise way, in a financially responsible way. And you mentioned Bonds. And I know another really important aspect of school finances are overrides. Can you explain the difference between the two and how they support our district?
LG: So bonds and overrides both require voter approval within the school district because both are an additional tax that go directly to property owners. The difference between bonds and overrides are that bonds pay for the major structures and buildings and things that we would are not provided funding for within our formula and the overrides are additions to our budget. The voters allow us to go above the amount that we get per student for either M&O or Capital. So it's additional funding for those, whereas Bond is actually paying for things that aren't even within our formula. So there are other things like the schools, like those major systems that we talked about earlier.
NR: Right. And I know that we've had amazing community support here in Madison and that we've been able to accomplish some really amazing projects due to the taxpayer approved bonds. Um, can you tell us a little bit about some of the projects we've been able to to accomplish in Madison because of that support?
LG: I too, would like to thank the taxpayers and the voters within the district for approving our bonds in the past and our overrides because they've really allowed us to deliver education at the level at which Madison delivers it. And I would say that some of the projects that we have been able to complete through our bond elections, are building of schools, rebuilding of schools, we've been able to change playground equipment, bring it up to date, and we've been able to do HVAC systems, painting some things that might not be as glamorous or that you may not even see, but that actually help us extend life of buildings within the school district as well as keep our students safe. A large portion of our last bond is directed towards safety measures at the schools.
NR: Absolutely. So it's really we're really grateful to our community for that support. It's allowed us to do so much. I mean, I've seen so many amazing projects go up just since I've been here, and it's really incredible to see. Another aspect of that, how often do taxpayers get to vote on bonds or overrides, is this something that happens quite often or as needed? Can you explain that process to us a little bit?
LG: Sure. So overrides actually are only good for a set amount of years. So typically we would have an override election every five years for M&O and Capital. But the way that the timing works on that, it might be they might alternate, so it might be one every three years because they have not typically been together at one election. A bond election is about every 4 to 5 years. Madison has gone to the voters to ask to support initiatives for the bond.
NR: So taxpayers will typically see this on the ballot every 4 to 5 years. So not too frequently, but I know that Madison actually has an override on the ballot coming up this November. So can you tell us a little bit about that and how that impacts the district?
LG: Yes, there is a district additional assistance override, which is a capital override on the ballot on November 8th. This is a continuation of a current override in place, and it goes to fund things that students can directly benefit from, such as technology, computers, furniture and equipment, preventative maintenance for our buildings, curriculum and copiers.
NR: Well, thank you. I appreciate your just giving us a brief overview of that. I know our Madison voters will see that in November. So thank you so much for sharing that information. Jumping back into kind of the details of school finance. Can we talk a little bit about what types of funding help support our classroom needs?
LG: Sure. There are so many different funding sources that go into supporting our classrooms and that funding can come from a variety of different places. We've really talked about how maintenance and operations and capital are the largest funds that funnel money into classrooms. However, in addition to those funds, we do have federal grants that help that we can apply for that do help us with class things for the classroom. We also have and they always say it takes a village. We have our PTOs that do help us. They bring money into our schools and they partner with us to to help as well. We have donations. We have the extracurricular tax credits which go to fund additional things that students can do, such as going on field trips or getting an author to come in and do a visit that really help us enrich what we bring to our students.
NR: Absolutely. And I just want to give a shout out again to Madison for having such amazing PTOs. This is something that I feel like is truly unique to Madison, that we just have amazing community members and parents who really step up and help support us, especially with classroom needs. So just thank you for that and thank you for giving again another overview of how how the different types of funding come into play when we're talking about classroom needs. And I know you talked about before that there's obviously funding for the classroom is important, but where does the rest of the budget allocated? I know there's there's so many other things that we do as a district that help support the classroom in indirect ways. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
LG: Certainly. So in addition to just what goes directly into the classroom, as you mentioned, there are all these different supports out there. Let's just start with transportation, getting students to school. So we have a transportation budget and we need to make sure that the teachers get their paycheck and they want to come in. So we have like central services and we have we have preventative maintenance that we touched on a little bit before as well, but really making sure that our facilities are maintained in a standard in which students can learn. We've heard a lot about what happens when schools aren't, but we certainly allocate part of our budget to that. We look at capital and technology and do our staff and our students have the resources that they need in order to be able to deliver instruction to students? So we constantly look at how we can support the students, where that comes from, how we can pay for that, as well as how do we keep the support side of the district going. As far as the buildings, the transportation and the staff to support the teachers.
NR: Right. Definitely important. And we couldn't function without all of those additional supports as well. So we talked about like the big umbrella of where our school funding comes from and how it falls into these buckets and how they can be utilized. But can you tell us a little bit about our budget process and are there stakeholders involved? How do we decide how to allocate these funds and these specific buckets and what we what we're going to use that for in the district?
LG: Yes. So we have a a very collaborative process around our budget process. We do have a budget advisory committee. That's one of those components that goes into creating an entire budget. The Budget Advisory Committee has community members, parents, staff, representatives from all schools and all school areas. And we look at and review the budget, make budget recommendations about where any new money should go. We look at things that have been done. We've in the past even put out a pilot program to try to help facilitate after school sports as well and clubs. So I think that that's one avenue in which the budget or one way the budget process is impacted. We also meet with every school principal and this is such a collaborative, comprehensive process because we invite all directors to help a school determine they can bring they do a resource planning meeting with us, so they bring all the needs that they see for the next year. Whether that be, we think that we would need something additional on the playground or this is what we have in technology, a need that we have there, and we bring all of us together so that we can look at our budget as a whole and then coordinate how the money is spent and how we are able to use our budget to facilitate the needs of the school.
NR: Thank you for sharing that. I know at Madison we really want to include everyone that we can. You said you talked about a variety of stakeholders, community members. We have principals, directors. So really everyone has a say in kind of where we're going to allocate this funding and how it's going to be utilized. And I know we really take pride in ensuring fiscal responsibility and stability, especially in times where things can seem and feel uncertain.
NR: So can you talk a little bit about how we ensure that fiscal responsibility and stability in Madison?
LG: I would love to talk about that. It's one of my favorite topics. When we look at fiscal responsibility, part of it really is managing our resources not just in the short term, but the long term. So any time that we are looking and then that creates obviously the stability, but any time that we are looking at putting something into the budget, we look at the long term impact of that and we look at what is it going to require to keep that going in the future. It's not just this year, but can that continue on into the future. And looking at perhaps there are some grants out there that actually have end dates. The grants aren't forever looking at the things that they fund and are when that grant is over, do we need to assume or bring those things back into our ongoing sources? So we're constantly looking at that. We're looking at the entire budget picture. So those buckets that I talked about, they cannot be looked at individually, they need to be looked at as a whole to see how you can draw upon each of them to fund what is needed at the schools. And we have been able to do that. We have been able to utilize all of our resources and just really be proud of what Madison has done. And we've done enough that actually quite a bit. And so we have the highest Moody's rating, which is the highest bond rating that you can get for your bonds. And why is that critical? That's important if you were to ask. That's important because then we can have a lower interest rate. So our bonds would cost taxpayers less money in the long run. It also shows that Moody's does a very extensive financial review and shows that they are deeming that we are fiscally sound, which is really critical in these days. And we do also receive awards from the Governmental Finance Officers Association, which is a nationwide association recognizing excellence in school district budgets. We receive an award from them as well as the International ASBO, which is the Association for School Business Officials, looks over everything that we prepare, looks over our audits and we have been the recipient of financial awards from them as well.
NR: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. I know, I see how hard our finance department works and just how much effort and really a multi tiered system kind of approach that we take to ensuring that finance the financial responsiveness. And I'm not a numbers gal, that's why I'm in communication, but I appreciate all that you do. You and your team does for us to ensure that financial responsibility for the district and our students. So thank you so much.
LG: Well, thank you, Nicole. And I just wanted to put out there that if anybody would ever like to come in and talk to me about our budget or finances, I'd love to talk about it and just let me know.
NR: Well, thank you so much again for being here today, Ms. Garvey, I know this is a complex topic to kind of overview in a short amount of time, so I really appreciate your time and we look forward to having you on again soon.
LG: Okay. Thank you very much.
NR: Thank you for listening to Parenting Future Focus Kids. To listen to our latest episodes, visit our website at Madisonaz.org/Podcast or Search Madison School District on Spotify.