CORDELE — In Crisp County’s Board of Education work session, it was reported that through three months of the year, only 18 percent of the budgeted revenue had been collected.

According to Crisp County Finance Director Donna Beavers, a total of $6,226,935.04 had been collected at the end of the first quarter of the 2018 Fiscal Year. However, there has been a total of $8,561,451.04 in expenditures, comprising 24.71 percent of the year’s budgeted expenses.

One of the reasons for this deficit in revenues is because the Board of Education has yet to receive a large portion of their funding from property taxes.

“Tax bills have not been sent out yet so that makes our revenue low at this time of year. This is normal,” Beavers said. “Our expenditures are right in line for the year.”

Currently, the Board of Education has a fund balance of more than $3.4 million.

In addition, the board heard a presentation from Alpha Delta Kappa’s local chapter in Cordele.

Crisp County Architect Greg Smith made a presentation to the board updating them on the progress for plans on building the new Crisp County Middle School.

Smith said the project would take place in the Fall of 2019 and take around 18 months to complete.

Smith said they needed to advertise what they were bidding for the state required 30 days and that a committee should be set up to decide how the county wanted to proceed with the construction bidding on the new school.

“With a project of this size it is safe to say there will be at least six or seven companies that will be involved in the bidding process,” said Smith.

A few things that Smith recommended that they use when determining what is important is: the quality and completeness of the submittal, how long that particular company has been in business, the amount of business that company has done in Crisp County, their project history and Claims history.

He also informed the board they will have to decide whether or not they would prefer it to be a one-step process, which would mean they would award the bids following the bid scoring or a two step process, which would be selecting two or three companies and bringing them in for an interview.

There were two requests for field trips, one for the Special Olympics State Fall Games, located in Gainesville, GA. The trip will take 16 students and 8 chaperons.

The second trip is for Crisp County High School’s DECA Fall Leadership Conference on October 19 and 20.

The final item of business was the private school annual report, which shows the amount of students in Crisp County attending the various local private schools.

A total of 181 Crisp County residents are attending a private school. 159 attend Crisp Academy, followed by Southland Academy in Americus with 10 students.

The trend in Crisp County residents attending private schools has decreased since 2013, when a total of 215 students opted against attending Crisp County Schools

The board will next meet on Tuesday at 5 p.m. for its regularly scheduled session.