MARSHALL — The Marshall Public School District is projected to end next school year with more than $400,000 in excess funds. However, that’s mainly due to emergency COVID funding that the district will be accessing in the 2023-24 school year, said Dion Caron, director of business services at MPS.

On Tuesday, the Marshall School Board held a special meeting to act on the district’s 2023-24 budget. The preliminary 2023-24 budget projected general fund revenues of about $37.67 million, and expenditures of about $36.45 million. That would leave the district with a projected general fund excess of about $1.22 million.

Caron said this week that the excess was caused by about $1.57 million in revenue from the district’s remaining Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds from the COVID pandemic. MPS will be accessing those funds in the 2023-24 school year, and the ESSER funds would be depleted after that, he said.

Factoring in revenues and expenditures in MPS’s food service, transportation, community service, capital outlay and debt service funds, the district is projected to have an overall excess of $476,838 in the 2023-24 school year.

School board members voted unanimously to approve the budget as presented at Tuesday’s meeting.

At a budget presentation earlier this month, Caron told board members that MPS was able to maintain its spending, and keep class sizes at guidelines set by the school board.

However, there would still be financial challenges ahead for the district. After the 2023-24 school year, state education funding increases will go down from 4% to 2%, Caron said Friday. Plus, one-time COVID funding would be coming to an end, and a proposed operating referendum for MPS failed at the polls in November. If hit had passed, the referendum would have raised the district’s general education revenue by $675 per pupil.

With all of those changes, Caron said, “We’ll have to make some adjustments,” and likely spend most of the excess funds from 2023-24.