Dr. David Hopson
The countdown to having a budget adopted by the school committee is underway with the understanding that 12 members of the school committee need to vote to adopt a budget no later than March 20, in order to meet our legal obligations to our seven towns. Despite March 20th being less than seven weeks away, the task can be completed as there has already been significant work done on the budget over the last few months. This work includes the development of department, school, and area budgets; the review of these budgets by central office staff; the discussion of priorities and directions by the leadership team; a review of supported activities by administrators with the school committee; and a review of the initial expenditures by the school committee and the school committee’s finance subcommittee. In addition, the business manager and I have initially met with the Gateway Towns Advisory Committee (GTAC – composed of town officials from the seven towns) to discuss the process, budget history, and expected changes moving forward.
In fact, based upon the recommendation of the business manager and myself, the school committee voted to reduce the budget by $121,000 and the leadership team has already developed Version 2.0 of the budget for presentation at the February 13th school committee meeting. Reductions include two academic coaches, a secretary, and travel. As with so many items in the budget that are closely related, these reductions significantly impact other areas including increasing duties for the middle school secretary, adding additional funding for professional development that was formerly done by the coaches, and taking certain teachers out of the classroom for part of each day to provide coaching/mentoring to their peers in lieu of what the coaches would have done. Thus, while we’ve saved $121,000, we’ve also changed teacher and student schedules, increased secretarial responsibilities, and decreased the opportunities allowed to the Director of Academics to work with other schools and professionals throughout the area. If we are asked for further reductions, these too will have ripple effects throughout the district that will impact our students and their education.
In the meantime, the leadership team will be working diligently to create a potential ‘prioritized reduction list’ so that school committee members, staff, community members, students, and their parents can see the impact of further reductions on student activities in the district.
One of the most difficult issues we all face is the change in assessments to our seven towns. For example, Version 2.0 of the FY’14 budget (based upon the Governor’s “House I” budget) has an average assessment increase to the towns of 4.33%. In part, the increase in town assessments is due to a loss of federal revenue, particularly money from the economic recovery/stimulus efforts. On a town by town basis, the differences in assessments range from a decrease (-11.83%) in Worthington to an increase (+10.31%) in Russell. These differences are not caused by the budget but rather by changes in the percent of students from each town in the district combined with the required minimum contribution established by the state. Worthington’s minimum contribution decreased by 18.85% while Huntington’s went up by 6.24%. What you can deduce from this is that, even if the Gateway Budget did not change from last year to this year, some of our towns would still see an increase in their town assessments.
For more information on the budget process, including a line item budget, the overall budget, a budget primer, and presentations to the school committee, please go to http://www.grsd.org/information/budget/2013-2014_budget_documents.
