Linn-Mar ‘well-positioned’ financially after last year’s cuts, superintendent says

MARION — The Linn-Mar Community School District is not making any big changes to its budget in the coming fiscal year after last year’s staffing cuts balanced the budget, school officials say.

Superintendent Amy Kortemeyer said the district is “able to stretch the dollar” despite what she called a historic underfunding of state per-pupil aid. Schools expect to see a 2 percent increase to per-pupil state aid next school year, which does not keep up with inflation, she said.

“I think we’re well-positioned to continue the excellence that the community has grown to expect for Linn-Mar education day-to-day in our classrooms. We’re able to make it work and provide an opportunity that’s top notch for our students,” Kortemeyer said.

The fiscal 2026 budget lays out a total $177 million spending plan, including the general fund budget and capital projects.

This is a decline of $20 million from the current fiscal year because of several completed facilities projects.

While new facilities projects — like the proposed indoor activities center — are on the horizon, construction expenses for them are not in the fiscal 2026 budget, said Jon Galbraith, Linn-Mar’s chief finance officer.

The general fund is the largest fund for a school district, with about 80 percent of it used to pay salaries and benefits for teachers and staff. The district’s general fund budget is about $106.7 million, an increase of $1.7 million from the current fiscal year.

The Linn-Mar school board last month approved the new budget, which begins July 1.

It calls for a property tax levy rate of $17.99 per $1,000 in taxable valuation, remaining the same as the current levy rate. Homeowners should expect to see a slight increase in their school property taxes because of increases to home valuations and a change to the state’s rollback adjustment that makes more of a home’s value subject to taxes.

For a homeowner with a $200,000 home, that would be an increase of $39.25 a year or about $3.27 a month.

The district made $2.5 million in budget cuts last year and reduced 50 staff members, attributing the need for a reduction to underfunding of state per-pupil aid, the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds and declining enrollment

“Last year, our goal was to make sure we made the cuts that we needed to balance our budget moving forward and not put ourselves in a situation where we had to make yearly cuts,” Galbraith said.

In Iowa, enrollment is the driving factor determining how much state funding a district receives. State aid runs a fiscal year behind. The district's student count in October 2024 will be used to determine funding for the fiscal 2026 budget.

This year, the district saw a decline in certified enrollment of 73 students — that’s a decline of 22 students more than expected, Galbraith said.

There are 896 students open enrolled out of the Linn-Mar Community School District and 607 open enrolled in.

This school year, the district saw 27 fewer students enrolling out of Linn-Mar into the Cedar Rapids district, and saw an additional 36 students who live in the Linn-Mar area enrolling into the Marion Independent Community School District, spokeswoman Renee Nelson said. Enrollment out of Linn-Mar into other neighboring public schools remained essentially the same as the previous year.

Many Iowa schools are seeing a steady decrease in enrollment. Factors contributing to the decrease include:

The school system is in its second year of surveying families who open enroll in and out of the district.

Families are coming into the district because “they love the programming, they love our facilities, they love the staff, they love the classes their kiddos have access to and the high-quality programming Linn-Mar schools offers,” Kortemeyer said.

Students open enrolling out are doing so because they want smaller class sizes and disagreed with “recent board policies,” Kortemeyer said. She did not specify which policies that families mentioned in the survey.

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