If you want to really exercise your brain, try to figure out the budget of your local school system. Determining how a $32 million deficit turns into a $10 million surplus can be a lot of fun.

Not.

But imagine if it was your job to figure out the school budget, like Guilford County Board of Education member Paul Daniels. “Understanding the budget is very important to me,” Daniels said during the board’s July 12 meeting.

The task was more difficult than usual. For starters, Daniels missed the previous board meeting, when Guilford County Schools chief financial officer Sharon Ozment informed the rest of the board that GCS had a $9.7 million surplus in what was supposed to be the toughest of budget years.

Two weeks later, at the July 12 meeting, that surplus had grown to $10.6 million. And the tale of “found money” at GCS could be repeated in other school districts, if the dire stories of fiscal ruin spun during the General Assembly’s budget debate fail to materialize.

Daniels was happy that GCS now had a surplus. Then Daniels related a story about a discussion he had with a Guilford County commissioner over another source of unexpected revenue in the form of $7 million in federal Title I funds.

“It seems to me it’s very difficult to go to funding bodies and say we need money and talk about budget shortfalls and increased costs when we’re sitting on $7 million,” Daniels said. “And now we’ve got another $10 million that we may or may not need.”

“In my mind, there’s no reason not to share with [commissioners] what we’re looking like on all of our lines,” replied Superintendent Mo Green.

Public school finance officers are numbers people by nature and not always effective communicators. Ozment — a 35-year GCS veteran — has gained a reputation as a master in the singular language of accountancy. But looking at the GCS budget the second, third, or fourth time, it’s not hard to understand how such a huge deficit became a surplus.

For starters, the doomsday scenario presented to GCS and school systems around the state didn’t materialize as expected. The downturn in the economy, the state’s projected $3.5 billion deficit, and the Republican-controlled General Assembly’s determination to cut that deficit without a tax increase dictated that schools would face major funding crises, complete with massive layoffs.

Indeed, former school board member Garth Hebert — a certified public accountant who lost his District 2 seat to Ed Price in the November election — expressed concern that GCS would lose between 300 and 500 jobs.

But doomsday never arrived. According to the spreadsheet Ozment presented the board, state budget cuts totaled only $13 million. Other increases in operating costs bumped that total to $17 million — far less than the $35 million deficit Ozment had hinted at earlier.

Ozment and her staff had drafted three tiers of budget cuts, one of which was subtracting two days’ pay from all GCS staff members earning more than $35,000 per year.

But Ozment absorbed the $13 million cut with help of a federal EduJobs grant. More savings came from $2 million in central office “reductions and redirections,” energy savings of $1 million, and conversion to a multi-tier transportation system that saves $700,000. As a result, the board pulled the salary reductions off the table.

GCS also applied for, and received, a waiver from the 185 school day requirement passed by the General Assembly. Those savings helped balance the budget, and weighted student formula funding — percentages of which GCS has held in abeyance for the last two years — helped provide the surplus.

The budget situation allowed the system to give an additional 25 percent of weighted student funding — extra money given to schools with large numbers of poor students or English language learners — back to the schools. GCS already had returned 50 percent to the schools, holding 25 percent in abeyance.

Those funds, combined with the central office “redirections,” made up the $10.6 million surplus.

Sam A. Hieb is a contributor to Carolina Journal.