First off: there’s a School Committee meeting this evening at 7:30PM at the Chenery Middle School to discuss proposed cuts for the FY 09 School Budget, in advance of tomorrow’s Warrant Committee meeting. Please attend either or both!
For those who may attend, here’s a quick rundown of the facts as they stand:
As the Belmont Citizen Herald reported on Thursday, the town is shifting some money around and finding funds in unexpected places to narrow what was a $3.6m deficit to around $1.4m. The schools will bear about $800,000 of that, given the estimate that school spending is around 56 percent of the town budget.
That’s “good news” in a ‘been down so long, its started to look like up’ kind of way. The truth is, $800,000 in cuts to Superintendent Holland’s budget will hurt almost as much as $1.8m in cuts, because of how tight school funding is without ANY cuts.
Just to try to put some context around the $800k figure, let’s remember: the school department asked for an increase of around $2.8m, or 7.5% for FY 09. To read some of the conversation that’s going on online, you’d think our school administration were spendthrifts out on a shopping spree. (Plasma TVs for the teachers lounge, anyone?) The truth couldn’t be more different. Of that 7.5%, salary increases (step and cost of living increases) account for 5.3% of that. Mandated costs (utilities, SPED, benefits, etc.) account for another 1.6%, so that’s 6.9% of that 7.5% increase — or $2.5m of the $2.7m extra that’s budgeted for ’09. Much of that money can’t be touched, so when the town asks for $800,000 to come off the top, cuts will have to come from the proposed programmatic increases — around $200,000 for new teachers to keep class sizes from ballooning, esp. in the 5th grade — and $470,000 for full day kindergarten. Count on those being gone. But that still leaves $200,000 or so from areas where the School Department is just requesting level funding from last year. Some likely targets: operations (building maintenance, etc.), student activities and non-core academic areas: libraries, technology acquisition, and so on.
Some of the line items for the FY09 budget, as well as FY08, are available, in PDF form here. It’s a bit dry, but read it and you can come to the meeting tonight and tomorrow prepared.