As difficult as it is to envision—given the delay in DESE approving this year’s budget—Gateway is now in the midst of creating the 2016-2017 school year budget. As always, the budget process starts early in the fall with administrators reviewing their current spending, discussing upcoming needs with staff members, and trying to deduce what might change with state and federal mandates. These building and department budgets are then combined with basic operational budget items (utilities, insurance, maintenance, etc.) to develop an overall budget for the district. After much review, the draft line item budget was given to the school committee (and shared with the general public) in early January. Since then, the school committee has had the opportunity to review the spending recommendations, ask questions about line items, and get a good feel for next year’s operations.
As we put this year’s budget together to meet the school committee’s goals (of reducing the budget by just over $400,000 to meet town financial concerns) our goal was to avoid any staff layoffs while trying to meet student needs. Fortunately, we were able to do that through a slight reorganization of the district, including reducing administrative staff by more than a complete position, by continuing our consistent efforts to improve the operational efficiency of the physical plant and by our ongoing work to obtain materials and services through both competitive bidding and working collaboratively with other organizations.
Another piece to the budget puzzle is the student census. Although we won’t have the ‘official census’ until March 1, the January 1 census shows some significant changes in the percentage of students in each of our member towns. This is important because these percentages determine the amount of above minimum and non-foundation funding that is assessed to the towns.
Another major piece to the budget process is state aid. This primarily comes in the forms of ‘Chapter 70’ aid to schools (and directly to towns for students at vocational schools) and regional transportation reimbursement. These amounts are not settled until the legislature passes a budget that is signed into law by the governor. This is a long process with the governor’s preliminary budget out at the end of January and the final budget often not approved until late June, or even later. Just over a decade ago, state aid paid for just over 60% of all district educational expenses; it is now under 40% (even though our budget is actually lower than it was in 2003).
This year, Governor Baker’s proposed budget level funds regional transportation reimbursement (which essentially means less money to regional schools as those costs increase year to year) and provides less money to those schools that are ‘held harmless’ due to declining enrollment (this year total student numbers declined in the state, especially in Western Massachusetts). Once again it appears that, despite its ongoing pressure to increase regionalization in the state, the state continues to fail to live up to the promises made to existing regional school districts regarding transportation. As we’ve seen time and time again, the less populated and rural areas of the Commonwealth continue to be overlooked despite our area legislators working together to try to overcome the numerical advantage that the urban areas have in the political arena.
We continue to work on the budget and input information as it becomes available. We expect to have a complete, although still draft, version of the budget for the school committee in early February, including preliminary assessment amounts for our member towns. As always, this information will be posted to the district website and we hope that community members take the time to familiarize themselves with the proposed budget well before annual town meetings.
