Dr. David Hopson
Superintendent’s Corner
The budget presented at the Public Hearing on March 7th (Version 2.0) reduces the total budget and town assessments while maintaining essential services. This budget eliminates several requests that would have enabled the district to move forward and essentially level-funds a budget that in many respects is also a level-service budget. What this means is that the level of staffing throughout the district doesn’t change and the cost of maintaining these educational services isn’t increasing from this year to next year.
This does not mean that this budget makes no changes in the district; in fact the changes resulting from this budget are significant. In order to meet the request from towns to reduce assessments, and yet maintain services to students, the leadership team reviewed the current, and projected, needs of the district. The result of this district overview was to eliminate one principal position and put the 5th and 6th grades under the control of the elementary schools’ principal. In essence, this splits the district in half with a principal and assistant principal for the elementary level (grades PreK-6) and another principal and assistant principal for the secondary level (grades 7-12). This change will also align staff certifications (elementary certification 1-6 while secondary is certification by areas taught), more evenly split the numbers of students on our two-tiered bus system, make more effective use of specialists, and reduce the overall administrative costs as the district enrollment continues to decline.
This budget does address some issues that have been coming to the forefront including the issue of class size equity at the elementary level, provides more adjustment counselor support in the district, provides potential changes to course offerings at the secondary level, and addresses the long-term need for capital maintenance for the district’s infrastructure. The total number of staff doesn’t change but the allocation of staff actually increases the number of people directly working with students. Any significant further reductions, as requested by the Town of Russell (who is requesting an additional reduction of nearly $500,000), would reduce the number of staff working with students, increase class sizes, and decrease student opportunities.
Financially, this is the fourth year of an overall reduction in the budget for the district resulting in the following changes from FY’09 to FY’13:
The district budget has been reduced by $1,361,557 (-7.61%)
The district has lost $958,249 in state educational aid (-13.7%)
The district has reduced overall town assessments by $310,374 (-3.1%)
Budgets have not accounted for inflation, which would have added over $1.3 million to the budget
Essentially this means that the district has absorbed all of the decreases in state aid, has absorbed the impact of inflation, and reduced overall town assessments for a total ‘real’ loss in expenditures of over $2.6 million or roughly 15%.
I do agree that assessments are up from this year to next, in part due to additional losses in state educational aid, but the total assessment increase is still 2.5%, well within the limits of Proposition 2 ½ and, when added together, are still significantly less than they were in FY’09. As the budget summary points out, the major changes in individual town assessments are due to a combination of the state’s determination on minimum spending and changes in student populations from each town.
The school committee must still adopt a budget for the towns to consider and have the final say in the bottom line of the budget, with the towns having the ability to accept or not accept the budget. The question, for everyone in our seven communities, is at what level of services and expenses do we want to support the education of our children? Or conversely, at what level will the state set the budget assuming that the towns cannot agree to support a budget at the level the school committee believes is necessary for meeting our obligations to the children of our district?
