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| Friday, October 03, 2008 |
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School Subsidy
By St Mary Administrator @ 2:50 PM :: 42 Views ::  :: Church News
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Port Catholic is dependent on three sources of revenue for its operations. Approximately 50% comes from tuition, 20% from grants, fundraisers and other third source funding, and 30% from parish subsidies. Each year Port Catholic prepares a budget for the fiscal year, which begins on July 1st and presents it to the Parishes for their approval. Once this is received Port Catholic plans its operations, based on its anticipated revenues.
This year, after approval of the budget for fiscal year 08-09, we (the trustees, Father Tom, and I) told Port Catholic we needed to cut our subsidy for the year by $25,000.
I think it’s no secret that several years ago Port Catholic was in serious financial trouble and had to borrow a substantial sum from St. Peter’s in order to continue its day-to-day operations. Since then Port Catholic has run on an extremely “tight” budget. In terms of actually total-operating costs Port Catholic has run almost flat over the past five years. The burden of achieving this has fallen on the faculty and staff who have taken pay raises equal to 4% over the past five years. This is an average; some staff have not even received this much.
Even though this $25,000 represents only about 2% of their total operating expenses, because they have so little leeway, it will have a significant impact on their ability to operate as they had originally intended to. They had planned to buy a new math series for grades K5-8. While it’s true that the teacher is more important than any text, new research and methods of teaching math which have been developed over the seven years since they bought the last series are now not available to them.
October’s 2nd collection on October 19th will go towards the $46,000 we still owe Port Catholic for last year’s subsidy. Please, be a generous as possible. Port Catholic, though it’s our biggest liability, is our biggest asset. With every dollar we send them, we are investing in the future of the church.
Thank you, Kim Glynn
Business Administrator
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