Gateway’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget was reviewed at the Annual Budget Hearing held on March 1. Despite the small crowd, a number of questions were raised and answered. In the end, it will be up to the school committee to adopt a budget for town consideration. For the budget to be ratified, four of our six towns must approve their assessments at annual town meetings. We anticipate that the final March 1st census numbers will be available and that these will further drive down the assessments for Blandford, Chester, Middlefield, and Montgomery while increasing the assessments for Huntington and Russell (the assessments are driven by the state’s calculations of minimum contributions and the percentage of students enrolled by each town).
While understanding that all of our towns are facing difficult financial times, and that the Gateway budget is only part of town expenditures, it is important to note several things. First, not only are four towns seeing another decrease in assessments, their assessments for next year are actually lower than they were in FY’09. Therefore, these towns have actually seen a decrease in the percentage of their town budgets that is spent on the district. Second, the overall budget is also lower than it was in FY’09, in fact it’s lower than it was in FY’03! Third, the requested budget increase of 1% is only possible due to the diligence of all of Gateway’s staff taking multiple steps to decrease costs, as well as to the district for not including the additional staffing positions suggested by the MARS study. Finally, if the towns were paying their assessments strictly based upon student percentages, then Huntington and Russell would be paying significantly more than they are under the statutory method (in fact, Huntington and Russell are paying less per student than any of the other Gateway towns).
Gateway did get some questions about declining student numbers and that certainly has made it possible for Gateway to reduce costs, but it would be impossible to believe that the overall cost would go down at the same rate as decreasing enrollment, due to the pressures of inflation on utilities, insurance, and salaries as well as the fixed overhead costs of our school buildings. Despite administrative and teaching numbers decreasing at or above the decrease seen in student population, there comes a point where additional staff cannot be cut due to the need to have appropriately certified staff and the need to meet state regulations.
There were discussions around various items by town officials: providing for dual-certified teachers, seeking waivers of certification requirements, further consolidation of buildings, increasing shared services with other school districts, and even ‘super regionalization’. While each of these bear additional scrutiny (and many have already been discussed and researched in terms of moving forward) the reality is that these are all long-term items that require significant work, as well as the desire by others to allow this to happen (DESE, other districts, MSBA). With the options Gateway has already explored, we’ve found that there are minimum savings and in some cases, additional costs. So despite the statement that the district and towns ‘cannot revenue themselves out of this situation’, the reality is that we must continue to push for the full implementation of Chapter 70 recommendations, increased funding of regional school transportation reimbursement, and the adoption of the Small/Rural Schools Initiative as part of an overall solution.
