The student activities fund: how much do districts keep?

Student activity fund — balance per student

Year-end Student Activity fund balance ÷ certified enrollment. Color marks the size of the cushion.

Student activity fund — ending balance ($ thousands)

CAR ending balance per district-year (hover a cell for the audited figure). Iowa City's FY2024 audit is now filed (June 2026), and it tells a sharply different story than the CAR — see the reconciliation below.

Revenue, expenditure, and net change — broken out

The money that flows through the student activity fund each year (CAR), and the resulting net change in the year-end balance. Net = revenue − expenditure = the change in fund balance (a positive net adds to the cushion; a negative net draws it down).

Revenue

Expenditure

Net change (revenue − expenditure)

Iowa City moves the most money through its activity fund of any peer, yet keeps the least. In FY2024 it ran $4.7M of revenue through the fund — $327 per student, the highest of all 15 (rank 1 of 15) — but its year-end balance is still the 2nd-thinnest. The reported net change above flatters the fund, though: ICCSD's reported revenue includes $0.3M–$0.9M a year transferred in from the General Fund. Back those out (next panel) and the fund has run an operating loss every year — including FY2024, whose apparent $+353K "surplus" was really an $842K General-Fund transfer masking a $-490K activities loss. The thin balance reflects activities that don't cover their own costs.

Iowa City: are activities actually self-funding?

Iowa's CAR requires every student-activity account to be non-negative at year-end, so ICCSD transfers money in from the General Fund to clear deficits before certifying (per the district's June 9, 2026 Board review). Those transfers count as revenue in the CAR — so the "true" net, with transfers removed, shows whether the activities pay for themselves. They don't.

Stripped of General-Fund transfers, Iowa City's activities lost money in all eight years — from $935K in the worst year (FY2023) down to $490K in FY2024 — a cumulative $-4.6M operating loss across FY2017–FY2024, backfilled by $3.8M of transfers from the operating fund. The dependence is not new: the activities ran a true operating loss every year back to FY2017, the earliest year with fund-level CAR detail. That is what the CFO meant in reporting the fund "loses money": the activities don't cover their own costs, and the gap is absorbed by the same General Fund that runs the district's ~9-days-cash reserve. (Transfer figures: Iowa CAR activity-fund transfers-in for FY2017–FY2023; FY2024 per the ICCSD Student Activity Fund Review, Board of Directors, June 9, 2026.)

Do peers do this too? Transfers in, and net before vs. after

Cumulative FY2020–FY2024. Transfers in = General-Fund money the CAR books as activity revenue. % of rev = how much of reported activity revenue is that transfer. Reported net includes the transfers; true net strips them out (activities only). Sorted by transfers received.

Most peers transfer in little or nothing — Iowa City is the outlier by a wide margin. Its $3.2M of General-Fund transfers over five years is the most of any district (rank 1 of 15) and nearly 4× the next-highest, and it is the share that most changes the story: a reported near-breakeven becomes a $-3.1M activities loss once the subsidy is removed. A few others (West Des Moines, Waukee, Dubuque, College) also lean on transfers, but modestly; six districts use essentially none. Note Des Moines runs a real activities loss too — but it shows up as a reported loss because it doesn't paper over it with transfers.

CAR vs. audited — do the activity-fund books reconcile?

Gap between the CAR (self-reported) and audited Student Activity balance. Green means they tie within rounding.

The activity fund reconciles cleanly almost everywhere — 71 of 75 district-years with both figures tie to the dollar, confirming the per-student picture above is not an artifact of one source. The handful of small gaps (Pleasant Valley ~0.5%, Ankeny FY2024 ~3.6%) are genuine CAR-vs-audit differences, not data errors — the audited figure is simply lower than the district's self-report in those years. Iowa City's FY2020–FY2023 activity balances tie to the audit exactly — but its newly filed FY2024 audit breaks that pattern: the CAR self-reported a +$384K activity balance, while the audited ACFR found the fund $983K in deficit — a ~$1.4M overstatement, in the same year its audit carried five material weaknesses.