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Due to Congress failing to act on all issues by the end of the year, Thomaston-Upson and other schools systems will not know for several more months if they are going to continue to receive federal educational grants.

Kathy Matthews, Director of Finance for the school system, updated the Board of Education at their Jan. 8 meeting. The school system has 24 state and federal grants totaling $7.2 million.

“In a prior board meeting, the directors who are responsible for these grants presented their budgets to you,” said Matthews. “At that time, it was what was expected to be allocated. Since that time, those budgets have been approved, either by the state or the federal government.

“Through November, all of the budgets are within line. We should be trending at 41 percent, and all of them are either at that level or less, except under the Youth Apprenticeship and the Ag Extended Day vocational budgets. Those expenses are always more that what the state allocates us, and either local funds or vocational funds absorb those excess expenditures

“Lastly, due to Congress not coming to any decisions at the end of the year, we’re not sure if we’re going to see any cuts in these allocations,” Matthews added. “ If we do, we’ll probably know by March if any of those grants are going to be cut.”

Matthews also noted that the fund balance difference for November of 2012 is higher by $3.7 million than it was in November 2011. She said the reason for the difference is that the school system received the check for its portion of property taxes in November of 2012, but did not receive the tax check for the previous year until December 2011.

In other business, Keith Rohling, who served as the Chairman of the Thomaston-Upson Board of Education two years ago, was re-elected to the position in the first meeting of the BOE in 2013. The Chairman is elected by the board every year. For the past two years, Terrell Jackson has served as Chairman, and continued to chair the Jan. 8 meeting at Rohling’s request.

Jacqueline Hollis, who has served as Vice Chair for the past two years, was re-elected and will continue to serve as Vice Chair.