Education cuts change Idaho Lottery distributions

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Story Published: Jun 1, 2009 at 5:16 PM MST

Story Updated: Jun 1, 2009 at 5:17 PM MST

By Anthony Congi

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IDAHO FALLS - Go to the Idaho Lottery website, and you can see how much money each school district in the state gets yearly from funds.

It depends on the number of lottery tickets and how the lottery office distributes the funds.

This scratcher may not have made me a winner, but Idaho schools have won. In fact, more than 17-million dollars from last year alone went to schools throughout the state. District 93 saw 578-thousand. District 91, around 650-thousand

According to state law, the lottery distributions have to be placed into a fund for facility upgrades or maintenance.

District 93 uses it for various projects such as repairing roofs, concrete work, carpet in the schools and new computers.

"With our construction going on, the buildings that we've been building, it's been very helpful for us to have those," says District 93 Director of Business Operations, Mike Sorenson.

However, next year, due to statewide budget cuts, State Superintendent Tom Luna moved the lottery funds for facilities into the state education's general fund.

"That means it's used now for ongoing expenses for this year. To help us maintain what we've got," says Sorenson.

The money this year will more than likely go toward salaries, benefits, books and even electrical bills.

District 91 will also be affected by these cuts; and this doesn't count the 2.1 million they already plan to cut for next year.

"Anytime you lose 650 thousand dollars, that's going to change the way you budget. I think the bottom line for us is it contributes to some of the cuts that we're making, the 2.1 million dollars in cuts because we're making some adjustments in what we do with our maintenance budget for next year," says District 91 Superintendent, George Boland.

School districts usually set their budgets in February, but with the loss of lottery funds, things have to be rethought.

There are a lot of project set for this year that were canceled because of the loss of these funds.

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