The Perry School District Board of Education approved their annual audit report at this month’s meeting and financially, the district continues to do well.

Superintendent Lynn Ubben says they’re fortunate to have staff on hand that know how to keep a good handle of things.

“We had a very positive audit report.  Kent Bultman, our business manager does a great job along with Laura Painter and Nancy Kiefer in the business office, they do a great job of keeping things running smoothly.  They’re very competent people so when the auditors come, they’re typically quite impressed” says Ubben.

And though things look good for now, Ubben says they’re preparing for a decrease in funding in the future.

“Our solvency ratio is good, we worked on that over the years.  What we’re kind of preparing for is a drop in enrollment.  We had a drop this year, we know that our numbers at the elementary are smaller than our numbers at the secondary and we kind of saw this coming.  I know Mr. (Clark) Wicks and I talked about this probably four years ago when we saw the preschool numbers start to get smaller.  That’s not an unusual thing, it’s just something that we need to plan for.”

So Ubben says it will take a close eye and careful planning to make sure everything can be maintained.

“Our goal is that even with decreasing enrollment maybe in the next three to five years, or maybe not, that we plan for it and we keep the staffing that we have and keep the programs that we have, and I think we can.  So we’re a little protective of that because we certainly don’t want to get into that scenario we got into with the 10 percent across the board cut so we need to protect ourselves from that” adds Ubben.

The legislature has not yet agreed on the state supplemental aid, or per pupil dollar for the 2015-2016 school year.