A recent blog post by Support Jeffco Kids (SJK) was titled “Unless You Count $ Twice, There is no Billion Dollar Budget”.
This post even led with the sentence “We’ve all heard the fictional story about the billion dollar budget for Jeffco and yet again this year, people are posting about it”.
Unfortunately for Support Jeffco Kids, the only fictional story is the one they are (once again) telling.
I don’t know about you, but based on SJK’s track record of exaggeration and misleading posts, I’ll believe the Colorado Fiscal Transparency website anytime when it comes to school districts’ revenues and expenditures.
The Colorado Fiscal Transparency site shows total spending of $933M and total funding of $981M for Jeffco in 2015-2016. That looks close enough to $1B for me, particularly accounting for increases over 2 years.
SJK can talk about the General Fund all they want, but if they had any understanding of financial accounting at all, they would understand that the budget is $1B.
Nice try though!
SJK wants to end the “false rhetoric”?
“Regardless, let’s end the false billion dollar budget rhetoric. “
as they wrote in their post.
But aren’t they the ones who are spreading the false rhetoric?
Sorry, SJK, once again your posts can be filed under “Alternative Facts”, “false” and “misleading”.
Note: As before, I was inspired to write this post because of another post by SJK that included the statement:
“It IS important to correct untruths and spread FACTUAL information online.”
I hope they don’t mind that I’m following their advice to “correct untruths and spread FACTUAL information online”!
Update September 18, 2017 – I found this text on the District web site (http://www.jeffcopublicschools.org/cms/one.aspx?pageId=927430):
As you review this information, we feel it is important to remember that Jeffco is the largest school district in Colorado, with more than 14,000 full and part-time employees.
The district’s total appropriated budget for 2016-2017 is $1,008,008,698.
I guess we really do have a $1B budget!