The Mammoth-San Manuel area used to be a thriving community with many small businesses in addition to the mine. Since 1999 when the BHP mine closed the school district has slowly dropped in enrollment with more low income families and retirees moving into town. The Mammoth-San Manuel USD has over the past few years consolidated to one school building, Mammoth-San Manuel Prek-12. The District Governing Board closed Gardner Middle School in 2000, Avenue B Elementary closed in 2009, Mammoth Elementary closed 2018, and lastly First Avenue Elementary closed in 2019 when we felt our enrollment had finally stabilized to a number that was not going to increase given the lack of industry in our community. We have closed 4 of the 5 school buildings in our town leaving the town looking even more desolate. The district still in possession of these buildings has to maintain the buildings and its grounds, which requires man power. This is in addition to the inoperable town’s community swimming pool which we inherited from BHP. We are currently working with the county elections to pass a vote in 2021 to sell our unused buildings. Given the location of the town on a dead end road, the marketing of these buildings will be difficult, but the attempt is there.

In 2018 we had to begin working on the one district school building we were not closing to make it appropriate for all ages and to accommodate the needs of all students moving into the building. Capital money had to be spent in this area and because of the enrollment loss we also had to move money to make up for the loss of students; $180,409 last year and so far, this year we have had to find $120,000 to move in our budget with more to come. We have cut back on our administration expenses and with less students we have less teachers. We do however have to meet the increased adaptive education students in our district, increased minimum wage, and the need to continue to be competitive with other larger districts to recruit teachers to our area where we are the only industry in town; it has become increasingly more difficult. The loss of federal funding has also exacerbated the budgeting issue. Since 2013-14 we have had a loss of $316,821 in Title and IDEA funds . To add to our problems we are maintaining an older building (1956) which is taking more and more work.

We have worked on making our Community Schools and Food Service Departments more self-sufficient so the district is not pushing money in that direction, we have applied to more grants given we have lost money in our Federal grants. We have also worked with energy management programs and installed solar power to help reduce our energy costs. It doesn’t help that the Arizona Tax Commission has frozen the tax rate leaving us at a disadvantage. We can’t raise taxes to generate property tax revenue and BHP Copper Mine took the tax base with them when they left. With low income families moving into the area the likelihood of passing a bond or override is non-existent.

We have been awarded, through ASBO and the GFOA the financial award, Certificate of Excellence in Financial Reporting. We have always carried money over for the next year and not had to borrow money to run our schools.