It was largely good news out of Monday’s school board meeting — hedged with a little bit of scholarly caution.

The Lawrence school board unanimously approved a reallocation of its budget that will provide the district $1,150,200 in available funds. The vote moves the money from the contingency reserve cash balance to the general fund, where it can be spent by the district.

The district plans to spend about half of the money on staff wages, though it’s not yet clear how many new jobs may be created or how any specific raises might work, except in a few cases outlined below.

Chief operations officer Kyle Hayden explained that allocation of the funds will primarily go toward increasing support and instructional staff, including:

• $412,500 for new elementary staff to keep up with increased enrollment;

• $65,450 in funding for clerical staff, including one new position of attendance secretary at Free State, and support services, with four more contract days for middle school guidance counselors;

• $47,250 in increased available funding for substitute staff,increasing pool of available subs and raising daily rate of certified sub teachers by $3 per day;

• $45,000 in increased available funding for custodial staff, targeted toward the middle schools, where educational staff frequently have to assist in custodial work when staff members are sick or away.

The other chunk of funds — $580,000 — will go toward bringing the nonwage budget back to where it was before this year.

Superintendent Rick Doll explained that “the district has been very frugal” and the spending is effectively from the district’s savings account to scale back on the cuts made earlier in the year and return the district closer to its past operating budget.

The process of moving the funds will begin today, finance director Kathy Johnson said, and that’ll include making plans for hiring. Doll said the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — June 30 — as per state regulation.

School board member Keith Diaz Moore expressed concern that the reserve account would be depleted “all in one binge,” but Hayden said that the spending would be “frugal and forward-thinking.”

In addition to the more than $1 million in requests for expenditures, the board plans to spend an additional $353,347 from the contingency reserve cash account during the current school year to leave a balance of $3,624,264 after June 30, 2012.

Also at the meeting, the board heard a presentation by Mark Tallman, associate executive director and director of advocacy for the Kansas Association of School Boards. Tallman, a former Auburn-Washburn school board member, spoke about per-pupil spending and achievement in several areas in Kansas, ranked against that of other states in the region and across the country.

Kansas does pretty well for itself, Tallman said. The state ranks seventh in the country according to his 11 “empirical measures of educational performance” and has been seventh for 10 years. But the states ahead of Kansas — Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Connecticut and New Jersey — have been improving at a faster pace than Kansas and governmental spending on education must be improved to keep standards high, he said.

The board also checked in with the English as a Second Language program and heard a presentation by Jennifer Attocknie, the district’s coordinator for Native American Student Services. The district has 572 Native American students and receives federal funding to provide tutoring and cultural enrichment programs for them. It’s a special population of students, Attocknie said, that “has specific academic issues” and the funding “helps them have an education that’s equal to other students.”

The ESL program has 430 elementary students and 70 certified staff. The program’s coordinators are encouraging more staff to qualify under a new methods-based training course.

As part of its consent agenda, the board approved a motion to give the go-ahead to a purchase order not to exceed $500,000 with Dell for computer repair, and an agreement with the Success by 6 Coalition for providing consultation on special needs education.