Enrollment in the Lawrence school district is being watched with a sharp eye, checked daily and sometimes even hourly, officials say, as the days tick down to the first day of school on Aug. 19.

Numbers at each school particularly matter this year because one of the district’s potential strategies for reducing costs is decreasing the number of sections in a grade if numbers permit, said Lawrence schools Superintendent Rick Doll at the school board’s meeting Monday night.

“We’ll make it as painless as we can, but there could be some (teacher) movement at the very last minute,” Doll said, noting that shifting teachers to where additional students are instead of just hiring another teacher will help the district reduce costs.

In the past, as Doll explained following the meeting, if one school in the district had an increase in enrollment, the district would just hire a new teacher to account for it, but this year another option is to instead transfer a teacher from a different school.

“We still could hire an additional teacher, but this is another option we’ll consider,” he said.

The strategy is part of a school board proposal approved in May to cut and reallocate more than $1.2 million in the district’s budget following changes in state aid. In March, the Kansas Legislature repealed the school finance system that had been in place since 1992 and replaced it with block grants for the next two years, during which time legislators will put together a new funding formula.

The new system did away with the per-pupil funding formula, which also included various weightings that provided more money for different categories of students, such as low-income or bilingual students. A lawsuit alleging the law is unconstitutional is pending.

“When you got to cut $1.2 million, you try to make the cuts as painlessly as possible,” Doll told the school board.

As part of Monday’s meeting, the school board approved its budget for the upcoming school year, which includes the first increase in the school district’s property tax rate in five years. Under the district’s 2015-16 budget, the rate will go up by 1.602 mills, from 55.752 mills to 57.354 mills. For the owner of a home valued at $160,000, that increases the property tax by about $30 per year.

The property tax increase offsets some of the state aid lost after the recent changes to the funding formula, said Kathy Johnson, director of finance for the district.

“The only way to make up for the revenue loss that the state took away is through local taxes,” Johnson told the school board.

A public hearing that would have given members of the community a chance to comment on the budget preceded the school board’s approval of the budget, but no members of the public were present.

Johnson also reminded school board members that though the district’s general fund shows a significant increase in state funding, it is primarily due to pass-through amounts, such as money for KPERS, the state pension plan, that are not available for operating expenses.

School board member Shannon Kimball said another concern is a proposed Westar rate increase. Kimball said that based on what the district spent on electricity last year, the increase would mean that the district would be spending approximately $65,000 more per year for the same usage.

“To insist that we should be able to operate on flat funding is not logical,” Kimball said, noting the rate increase as an example of an increased cost that the district may have to account for in the next two years while the block grant is in place.

The final budget document will be published in a report to the county and the Kansas State Department of Education on Aug. 25.