The first version of the budget is complete and the entire document and supporting materials, including the line item budget, may be found on the district’s website. Due to much effort on the part of district staff, the current overall increase in town assessments is 2.11 percent, well under the 2.5% target based upon proposition 2 ½. However, due to changes in the percentages of students in each town and the changes in the state mandated minimum assessments, the town assessments vary from a reduction of 6.52 percent for Montgomery to an increase of 5.41 percent in Huntington. This budget is based upon the established fiscal goal of the school committee, intended to account for the loss of $630,000 in mitigation funding. This required substantial budget reductions between FY’16 and FY’17 of over $426,000. The fact that this reduction does not eliminate any sports, extracurricular activities, or require any expensive staff layoffs, is a testament to the hard work put into creating a budget that bridges the needs of the district for student services and the need to hold assessments to our member towns. The budget does incorporate some major changes; for example, we again eliminate more than one administrative position, create prek-5 elementary schools, a 6-8 middle school, and maintain a 9-12 high school. The presentations on how this budget, and these changes, impact student services are also found on the district’s website and kudos to both Mrs. Coburn and Mr. Finnie for developing and presenting this information to the school committee and the public.
This budget also continues to meet the ideal of “whole child” education, supports 21st Century Skills, provides a better ability to meet the needs of the middle school student, and continues providing Advanced Placement courses and online courses in the high school. As one of the school committee members mentioned during the course of developing this budget (the school committee has been informed of changes required by the budget as we’ve moved through the development process), this is a budget that carefully takes a scalpel to the budget rather than chopping items with an axe.
Despite this, the initial indication by many town officials at this week’s GTAC meeting was that even this modest increase may be too much for the towns to agree to, given their own needs. One suggestion was that we hold the overall assessment increase at zero (which would still mean some towns would face an increase in their assessments); this would require an additional reduction of nearly $200,000. Another suggestion was that no town’s assessment should increase by more than 2.5% (requiring at least $250,000 reduction from the current budget proposal). The last time Gateway’s budget was this low was in FY’06 and reductions in just the past two years is almost $900,000. So under either of the scenarios suggested at GTAC, our reduction over the past two years would be at or over a million dollars. As the numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue indicate, our towns have not reduced their budgets significantly over this time period and in fact, have seen a decline in the percentage of their overall budgets spend on Gateway, or even the total educational budget (Gateway plus Vocational Schools). However, we will develop scenarios for school committee consideration that cut enough out of the budget to reach GTAC’s suggested levels. As I told the GTAC meeting, this would almost certainly be teaching staff and most likely concentrated at the middle and high school levels. As always, I urge people to take an interest in the budgetary process and, especially this year, consider attending the Public Hearing on the Gateway Budget that will be held on March 2 beginning at 7 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center, as that would be the last opportunity to provide feedback to the school committee before they adopt a budget by the middle of March.
