TURNERS FALLS — As the Gill-Montague Regional School District begins budget conversations for the 2017-2018 school year, the preliminary budget presented last week seeks a 1.5 percent increase from last year and several staffing cuts to keep the increase minimal.
The presented budget of about $22 million includes $25,000 for new student computers but also includes staff reductions and delays on maintenance. It includes the reduction of four teaching positions and three paraprofessional positions to save a total of $250,000, and doesn’t include the funding for new positions, like the school resource officer the district and Montague Police have expressed interest in acquiring for the district.
District Superintendent Michael Sullivan said the district could have proposed a budget with an increase of about $1,000,000 but knew that wasn’t realistic even though six requests for additional staffing across the district’s schools were needed. The preliminary budget is based on Montague Finance Committee’s “affordable assessment.”
Sullivan said they kept the district’s long-term goals in mind when crafting the budget, including keeping class sizes low, keeping existing programs, improving student readiness to learn and literacy achievement.
He said the preliminary budget reflects the difficulties of keeping costs low while trying to improve the education of students.
“It means we knew we needed to make some really difficult reductions,” Sullivan said. “Again, they’re not going to impact the experience that students have to a large extent, but they are going to definitely impact our ability to make improvements in the areas I mentioned.”
The preliminary budget has an increase of $322,550, or 1.5 percent. That is a smaller increase than previous years. The 2016-2017 budget had an increase of about $705,736, or about 3.45 percent from the previous year.
The district is set to lose about $130,000 in funding from Erving student enrollment, based on lower enrollment numbers from the current fiscal year.
At about 50 percent, the biggest portion of the budget is wages for staff, which is on par with previous years. Other large portions include benefits, at about 19 percent, and about 12 percent of the budget goes to charter school tuition. The major pieces of the budget are similar to the previous budgets.
The budget still has to go through several stages of approval before it is voted on by the two towns that are served by the district: Gill and Montague. There will be a School Committee public hearing. Then the School Committee will reassess once the state budget is released, because the district’s budget is based on state aid estimates. About half of the district’s funding comes from the towns and about 32 percent comes from the state.
In March, the School Committee will meet with the towns’ selectboards and finance committees to discuss the budget. Later that month the School Committee will take a vote on the final budget and then it will be voted on in town meetings.
The budget is set to be finalized by both towns in early May.
The School Committee is set to discuss the budget on Tuesday.
Reach Miranda Davis at
or mdavis@recorder.com.