In a report on the finances of the Woodland Park School District, David Kuritar, chief financial officer, encouraged the board of education to consider taking advantage of the Colorado state treasurer’s short-term zero-interest loan program for Colorado school districts. Because the district re lies chiefly on property taxes for revenue, large payments don’t begin hitting the bottom line until March, said Kuritar, speaking at the meeting Dec. 10. “We need this loan even more than last year; the loan is based our ability to pay back the loan by June 30,” Kuritar said. The board approved the resolution authorizing the district’s participating in the loan program. Two days after the meeting, the district received a check for $890,000 for the interest-free loan, with approval to borrow an additional $1.1 million, Kuritar said. The repayment is due at the end of the school year. At the meeting Dec. 10, Kuritar was upfront about the financial outlook. “My concern is that we are going to end up this year with less money than we started with,” he said. “We already know from the Colorado Department of Education that our revenue is not going to change; even if we added 50 kids, it still wouldn’t get us back to the per-pupil average. Board president Keegan Barkley was on board with the loan program. “I talked to the state treasurer and he encouraged us to do this, that a majority of schools in Colorado participate in this program,” she said. “I don’t see any downside to this.” Board member Carol Greenstreet added that some residents think if their property taxes go up the schools are getting more money. “That is not true,” she said, as Kuritar affirmed. Acknowledging the board will try to regain the voter-approved city sales tax of 1.09%, which the City Council rescinded last year, or a new countywide sales tax, nonetheless, the deficit is coming quick, he said. “I just want to extend the warning as we don’t have much time.” In a subsequent discussion about his true-up report to the board, Kuritar offered clarification about the effect on Merit Academy of the City Council’s vote to rescind the tax. “Merit created a budget before the City Council voted to end the sales tax in March, but the city continued receiving sales tax remittances from businesses and passed those sales tax revenues to the district through June,” Kuritar said. However, he added, the district continued to flow through the same payments to Merit even though there were no receipts from the city that supported that size of a payment. “So, we calculated what they should have received,” Kuritar said. The calculation amounted to a payment of $377,918.93, based on the academy’s student count of 452 last year. “We overpaid them by $291,117.33. Merit has said they agree with the document,” Kuritar said. The initial true-up report, uploaded to the district’s website, shows that Merit owed the district $799,794.52, which includes $437,212.88 in transportation and charter administration fees. The administrative fee is not a fee required by a school district to be collected from a charter school. “For what this true-up is covering, the district didn’t have it in their budget to collect it, Merit didn’t have it in their budget to pay it, so to pull the trigger right now would be a blindside,” Barkley said, speaking at the meeting Dec. 10. However, Merit has verbally agreed to pay the fees going forward for the fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2026, Kuritar said. Including overpayments and costs for Merit covered by the district, he added, a revised fiscal year 2025 true-up report states the amount Merit owes to the district for fiscal year 2025 is $362,581.64. The board is scheduled to approve the true-up report Jan. 14. ...read more read less