Dr. David Hopson
Several interesting items have taken place in the last several days regarding the Gateway District. On Monday, the Town of Worthington voted roughly 5 to 1 at a special town meeting to proceed with their plan to withdraw from Gateway and form their own school district. Preliminary figures from the meeting show that the average taxpayer will be paying approximately $400 more per year in property taxes for the privilege of having a multi-aged, K-6 public school physically located within their town. For the other six towns, this withdrawal may potentially increase town assessments by $630,000 if the state does not live up to the promise in the legislation to hold harmless the remaining towns.
Related to this change, the school committee voted on July 9th to move forward with the required educational plan for the district ‘post-Worthington’ , which keeps the district’s physical and operational configuration unchanged due to the small number of Worthington students that would be lost in any given grade. This plan is one of several steps that must be taken to fulfill the requirements of the home rule legislation that allows Worthington to leave. Within the next several months, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will convene a needs conference to review all aspects of education in the district and report their findings back to the legislature. At that point, the DESE will be taking input from town and school officials, parents, and other community members.
Because five of seven towns did not pass the budget at recent town meetings, DESE has now set a 1/12th budget for the district for the 2014-2015 school year that is based upon the school committee’s recommended budget (Version 1.2). To clarify, that budget is larger than what the towns paid for the year that just ended. At their first meeting in June, the school committee asked that a new budget be developed to reflect changes in educational needs that have arisen over the past several months, since Version 1.2 was developed for town meetings. The Version 2.0 budget was developed and shared with the committee and public during the last meeting in June with a total expenditure equal to that of the first budget proposal. The major changes between the two budgets are line item amounts that reflect the need for additional pre-school space, a half-time Spanish/Multi-Cultural teacher for the middle school and high school, increases in various items such as utilities, and decreases in items that we now have a definitive cost for (such as insurance). These changes, and the various versions of the budget, may be found online.
One of the items holding the committee back, and expressed in several towns, was the uncertainty of the amount of regional transportation reimbursement from the state that would be used to set town assessments. As of the school committee meeting on July 9th, the Governor still had not signed the state budget. The suggested motion by the committee was to adopt Version 2.0 of the budget and adjust assessments based upon the approved budget cherry sheet (once the state had an approved budget) and send that budget and assessments to the towns. Unfortunately, adopting a budget requires a positive vote by 12 committee members and, at the time of the last vote, the vote was 11 to adopt and 1 to not adopt Version 2.0 of the budget. With this failure to adopt, and an apparent inability to get the required number of school committee members to attend a special meeting over the next two weeks, the district will be sending back Version 1.2 (previously not approved by the towns) for reconsideration. As the school committee had previously voted to turn back to the towns any additional transportation reimbursement, the school will adjust the assessments before sending this budget to the towns.
