At the close of the second public hearing Thursday night, Carroll County Board of Education members unanimously approved a $113.7 million tentative budget for publication, but as actual funding figures come rolling in there may be a few adjustments.

At the first public budget hearing, board members asked that a few items be restored after the addition of federal stimulus money created about $1.1 million in wiggle room.

Two counselor positions were restored and split between Jonesville Middle, Whitesburg Elementary, Roopville Elementary and Mt. Zion Middle schools. One media specialist position was added back as well as four positions at the Technical Education Center. The school bookkeepers whose contracted days were cut received 10 more days of work and the pay cut for extracurricular positions, such as coaches, was reduced to 1 percent.

The total cost of the changes was $1.3 million, and will mean the system has to dip into its cash reserves for $135,404 to balance the budget. The board members unanimously approved the changes.

The entire budget expenditures are $113.7 million and $100.3 million of that is for salaries and benefits, said Chief Financial Officer Greg Denney.

“We had to cut $6 million out of our budget and with this much in salaries and benefits, that’s where we had to make the cuts,” Denney said. “The cuts had to come in people. We realize that’s hard on our employees and hard on our community when you lose that amount of people, but when a budget is this high in salaries and benefits, we had to make those cuts.”

The budget will require no millage rate increase and the tax digest is smaller this year than last year, so the board will meet to set the millage rate but will not have three public hearings.

In June, the board members will vote on final approval of the budget.

The state has released the Homeowner’s Tax Relief Act dollars to local governmental bodies and the school system should receive its share, about $2.5 million, in the next couple of weeks, Denney said.

But the additional austerity cuts the state mandated will come out of the state funds in May and June.

“We’re 83.3 percent into the fiscal year, but we’ve spent 79.5 percent into the budget,” he said. “We’re really conserving funds and we’re trying to make up that $3 million austerity cut the state gave us.”

With the conservative spending the system has been able to protect its reserves to make it through next year, without having to resort to tax-anticipation loans to make payroll.

The system received $729,397 in special purpose local option sales tax revenue in April, down 30 percent from year-ago levels, Denney said.