Finance Management Strengths and Accomplishments • Annual Audits for the past seven years have yielded unqualified, clean opinions with only best practice suggestions and modest accounting adjustments to keep the school aligned with industry practices. • Annual operating budgets have achieved year-end surpluses five out of the past seven years, with both of the two year-end deficits having been forecasted and pre-budgeted. • Tuition levels have grown at levels commensurate and in line with Dallas area private schools for at least six years. • At the end of the 2019/2020 fiscal year, th e school was able to eliminate its “float” amount (employing the subsequent year’s tuition dollars to pay current year expenses) for the first time in more than ten years. • The school has been investing gradually and more significantly in teacher professional development, in order to keep our instruction at the highest quality possible. • The school added retirement benefits, in the form of an employer percentage match, in an effort to improve the school’s employee benefits. • Cost of Living salary adjustments were instituted in six out of the last seven years. The one year of zero raise came in this Covid year of 2020/2021. • Over the past several years, the school has been able to invest more heavily in financial assistance — in the formof discounted tuitions — more than doubling our total financial assistance over six years; at the same time, we have been able to accomplish break-even or better operating budgets five times over that span. • The school has been able to launch a new summer camp opportunity, Summer@Levine, for ages six thru twelve, and the numbers are growing steadily for the summer of 2021, in only our third year of operation. Finance Management Challenges • The school recognizes that it has not been able to uphold the widely accepted practice for independent schools to maintain three percent of the total cost of replacing the physical plant in a separate budget called PPRRSM (provision for plant replacement, renewal and special maintenance.) • The recent enrollment downturn at Levine, due to the pandemic, of 16% entering the 2020-2021 school year, will mean serious budget tightening in the next several years while the school attempts to build back this enrollment. • The quest to offer competitive compensation levels — considering other private school salary ranges and published public school teacher salaries — remains a challenge to realize across the board. • The need for a more substantial endowment, at a level that would allow for a more significant draw to support annual operations, will be critical to the school’s long-term effort to achieve financial sustainability.
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