Shelby County School officials scrambled Tuesday to make up a loss of about $3 million from their October budget.

Superintendent Randy Fuller said he received an urgent letter from State Superintendent Joe Morton notifying him the state could only provide systems with 75 percent of their October allocations.

“We have some serious concerns being that this is the first month in the budget year,” Fuller said. “We can handle it this time, but if it continues throughout the year, it could become a real problem.”

Morton’s letter explained that the state had not received enough tax revenue to meet 100 percent of its funding requirements and had no money left from last year’s budget to do so.

Fuller said Shelby County was lucky to have the money in reserves — several school systems had to resort to short-term loans. In the letter, Morton said the state planned to repay school systems by the end of next week.