The Decatur County Board of Education announced Thursday the Decatur County school system was four percent under budget.

“At the end of March we are at four percent under budget and it looks like we are going to stay there, which will help us in a tremendous way as far as helping us on next year’s budget,” school system financial advisor Tim Matthews said.

As students and teachers begin to wind down the school year, they will begin to move into testing season in May.

“We are in the middle of the biggest testing season,” assistant superintendent April Aldridge said.

The school system recently completed their regularly scheduled testing with CRCTs for grades three through eight and complete led DCIAs, which is our local assessments, for grades one and two.

“We will continue with makeups and things like that and prepare to send all of that out next week.”

That will lead straight into the high school testing season with EOCTs, AP exams and “of course, good old fashioned regular final exams to finish out the high school assessment,” Aldridge said.

For the first time ever, Decatur County schools will have the option to retest for the CRCT online. The new option is statewide and a brand-new step in moving to online testing.

“I am optimistic we won’t need to practice with online testing because there is lots of evidence of great teaching and great student learning, so we hope to see great results when we get our CRCT test scores back,” Aldridge said.