Dallas County presented Thursday a budget that reflects the system’s growing financial woes.

The Dallas County School Board approved the 2015 fiscal year budget with total revenues of $26.1 million and total expenditures of $26.2 million. The budget also reflects an expected reserve of $643, 529.98, well under the state-required, one-month reserve of approximately $2.2 million.

“We cut where we can cut, and we continue to, obviously, educate our children to the best of our ability,” Dallas County School Board president Mark Story said.

Dallas County Superintendent of Education Don Willingham said the lack of funding was expected, considering the system’s constant struggle to reach the one-month reserve for the past nine years.

As a result, the system has been submitting a corrective action plan to the Alabama State Department of Education, explaining how it plans to reach the required one-month’s reserve within a three-year period.

The board approved last year a plan that included eliminating personnel positions, sometimes not refilling positions left open by employees retiring and having remaining employees absorb the duties of those positions.

Willingham said he knew the actions listed in the system’s latest corrective action plan would not completely eradicate the system’s financial trouble within a year, but he had high hopes the half-cent sales tax the Dallas County Commission implemented in Dec. 1, 2012 would help with the financial situation.

To Willingham’s dismay, county auditors learned more than a year after the sales tax was implemented that the tax revenue was inappropriately distributed.

Because the county tax applied across the county, both the county school system and the Selma City School System should have been benefiting from the tax.

Since the county commission amended the tax to include the Selma City School System in June, the Dallas County School System has been sending the Selma City School System it’s share of the tax revenues.

“We never expected to reach the [one-month reserve] this year, or the next year or the next,” Willingham said. “We hoped we would do it in three years and certainly thought we would do in four. Now that the revenue has changed, our whole thought process has to change a little.”

Willingham said the Alabama Department of Education will submit a letter requesting a corrective action plan near the end of October if the board’s operating expenses are still less than one-month’s worth of reserve.

The board must approve the corrective action plan Willingham submits before it’s sent to the state.