I’m hopeful that by the time everyone reads this article, Governor Baker will have signed the FY’15 Supplemental Budget. This budget includes $630,000 in mitigation funding to assist the district with the FY’16 budget after the state allowed Worthington to withdraw from the district. Once the Governor signs this bill, the district will send new assessment letters to our member towns reflecting an overall reduction in assessments of $630,000. Given Montgomery’s and Middlefield’s approval of the original budget, and Huntington’s approval of an amount over what would be needed with the mitigation reduction, this means that the district needs only one more town to approve the new assessment amounts to have the budget approved for the 2015-2016 school year. As I’ve written in the past, if any of the remaining three towns (Blandford, Chester, or Russell) had approved an assessment amount equal to that with mitigation funding as Huntington did, they would not have to hold an additional special town meeting (in fact, Blandford approved this amount at its annual town meeting but then rejected it at the special town meeting).
I am very thankful to Gateway’s entire legislative delegation for their ongoing efforts to ensure that we were given this mitigation funding, which allows the district some additional time to determine how best to move forward without Worthington. It’s nice to note that, whether a Representative or Senator, whether Democrat or Republican, or whether they live in the district or not, all of our legislators were supportive of this cause.
As GTAC rolls out its Sustainability Task Force on November 12 at 7 p.m. in Stanton Hall (officially looking at ways both the towns, and the school district, can look at efficiencies, as well as looking at potential areas of economic growth) and Gateway continues its ongoing 10-year planning process (Gateway 2025), it’s important to recognize that public education continues to be a linchpin in our achievements as a country and as a society, including as a driver of economic success.
While on this topic, I’m thankful to the people who took the time to complete the Gateway 2025 survey. We had 211 responses with 37% coming from staff and 63 percent from community members and students. Out of the 78 staff members responding, 56 percent lived in the district, nearly 18 percent attended Gateway as a student, and 50 percent had children that attended the district. From non-staff members, 78 were from either current or prior parents of students in the district, 21 were not parents/students and 34 were students. We are currently analyzing the data and will be releasing survey responses as we move forward. It seems likely that given the amount of data to analyze and the crowded calendar around the holidays, we will be planning our ‘face to face’ meetings on laying out a 10-year plan for the district sometime after the beginning of the year.
In the meantime, the school committee returns to meeting at the Gateway complex after holding meetings in each of the district towns and, if one additional town approves the budget, will be able to focus on the FY’17 budget. The school staff is hoping that the school committee will provide an overall direction for budget planning for FY’17 under one of these four broad categories: (a) reducing the current budget by $630,000; (b) adding 2.5 percent to that number to account for cost increases; (c) level funding the current budget; or (d) allowing growth in the current budget to account for cost increases. As the dollar differences between scenarios (a) and (d) is over a million dollars, knowing the overall budget target allows for much more accurate planning in order to meet our common goal of providing an exemplary education to the youth who are our future.
