As we’ve experienced over the last year or more, the Gateway Regional School District remains in limbo regarding our budget; in fact, I believe we may be the last school system in the state to not have an approved budget in place for this school year. Unresolved issues include mitigation funding from the Commonwealth and the court case initially filed by Ruth Kennedy. As these items are all related, and each is seemingly going to have some resolution soon, I thought it important to update our community on these two issues.
Anyone following the state proceedings knows that the House included mitigation funding for Gateway in the fiscal year 2015 Supplemental Budget but the Senate did not. As this was not the only difference in the supplemental budget bills passed by the House and Senate, this issue now goes to a conference committee to iron out the differences. We’re hopeful that the final supplemental budget will have mitigation funding that will allow Gateway to proceed with the current year’s operations while planning for the future (we are all aware of both the Gateway 2025 and the GTAC sustainability planning that are currently underway).
Part of our planning process requires some solid answers as to both the legality of Worthington withdrawing from the district and a determination of just what Worthington owes to Gateway in terms of post employment and retiree costs for the nearly five decades that the town was a part of the district. Michele Crane (school committee chair) and I were able to attend the preliminary hearing on the lawsuit to determine the legality of Worthington being able to unilaterally withdraw from the district through ‘home rule’ legislation, despite the other six towns voting to not allow the town to withdraw, as set forth in the regional agreement amendment. I believe the basic decisions that the court will decide (sometime in the near future but, according to the judge, not for at least two weeks) is whether Huntington, the School District, Ruth Kennedy and/or Derrick Mason have legal standing to sue Worthington and whether there is sufficient legal precedent to move the suit forward rather than dismissing it as Worthington argues. Should the court decide that at least one of the plaintiffs has legal standing, and the legal reasoning is sufficient to at least allow the case to proceed, we’ll be moving forward with presenting the rest of the legal arguments supporting the contention that the withdrawal was not handled in a proper and legal fashion. If this happens, there is always a chance that an injunction would be granted that would halt Worthington’s withdrawal until the case is concluded.
For most, these two essential decisions (mitigation funding and Worthington’s withdrawal) can be seen as having a pivotal role in adopting not only the current year’s budget, but also in developing next year’s budget. While I know some towns have been particularly adamant in arguing that the district should drastically reduce its expenditures, the fact that these two undecided items remain makes it impudent and ill-advised for the school committee to slash the budget and student services before learning the outcomes of the state budget and legal issues.
We remain optimistic that we’ll have some solid indications of what will happen with these two items within the next couple of weeks, which will provide a more solid basis for both the towns, and the school district, to move forward with making decisions that will have a long-term impact on the district as a whole and in meeting the needs of our children.
