“Name that Year” is designed to put your knowledge of Tracy and its newsmakers of the past to the test. Each week, we will publish a news item that ran in a past edition — maybe it was a major event, or a story about a Tracy resident — it’s up to you to determine in what year that particular news item hit the pages of the paper:
• BIG CHANGES ARE ON THE HORIZON FOR THE MILROY SCHOOL DISTRICT.
The Milroy community has decided to seek charter school status for all or part of the district. The decision came at a public meeting Tuesday night at the school.
At the meeting, community members heard about the financial state of the district, and what options the school has in order to keep its doors open.
The district’s most recent audit, which was presented in October, showed that the district’s general fund was about $71,000 in the red. This puts the district in what is called statutory operating debt (SOD).
Milroy Principal Dan Deitte explained how the district got into this situation, and what being in SOD means for the district.
“You’ve probably heard of other schools in the area that have gone through this,” he said. “It’s not just Milroy, but we have to deal with this.”
Graphs distributed to community members demonstrated the natural relationship between the number of students and funding received from the state. The primary reasons for the negative change in the general fund balance, Deitte said, are declining enrollment, efforts by the school to maintain small class sizes, and the fact that inflation has increased faster than revenue increases from the state.
Every time we lose one pupil unit, we lose $4,601,” he said. “We can cut and cut, but at the same time, you don’t want to lose the quality of your school.”
Another issue stemming from declining enrollment has been the loss of students in August, which is past the deadline for cutting staff for the coming year. The same issue applied in October, when the district realized it was in SOD.
• Last week’s answer: Sioux Valley Tracy Medical Center was rebranded with new names in 1997 thanks to a $400 million donation to the Sioux Valley Health System.
