Evanston Township High School received two plaques commemorating excellence in the way it reports and presents its annual budget to taxpayers.
Superintendent Eric Witherspoon presented the plaques Monday night to Chief Financial Officer Mary Rodino at the District 202 Board meeting.
For the ninth consecutive year, District 202 has received a Certificate of Excellence in Financial Reporting from the Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) and a Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA).
The ASBO award honors school districts for excellence and best practices in financial reporting. About 60 of the 852 public school districts in Illinois receive this award, Witherspoon said.
Guidelines for the GFOA award are designed to assess how well an entity’s budget serves as a policy document, a financial plan, an operations guide, and a communications device.
At Monday night’s meeting, the board approved the $84.3 million budget for the current fiscal year following a public hearing at which no member of the public came forth to make comments. The new budget represents a 1.3 percent increase over the preceding fiscal year’s budget.
The district’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. At the end of the last fiscal year, the district fund balance amounted to $40.7 million. The current year’s budget anticipates an increase in that balance to $41.3 million by June 30, 2018.