NORTHFIELD — Pioneer Valley Regional School District administrators now estimate the district’s total deficit to be about $600,000, roughly half of what the deficit was thought to be at the end of the last school year.
The deficit was estimated to be about $1.2 million as of Aug. 31, and previous estimates had ranged as high as $2 million.
On Thursday the district’s director of finance, Tanya Gaylord, told the School Committee that she had decreased her estimate again after discovering that about $500,000 had been unnecessarily set aside in the 2017-2018 school year.
“We got as close to breaking even as we could in FY ’18 (fiscal year 2018, the 2017-2018 school year),” Gaylord said.
The total deficit will determine how much money the district borrows if and when special legislation passes allowing it to borrow up to $2 million to be paid back over a period of up to 10 years. The bill is now in the Senate, having been passed by the House of Representatives, and could be approved any time before the Senate’s session ends Jan. 1.
There is still some uncertainty over whether the state will require the district to include in the borrowed amount the “school lunch debt,” which all four towns have agreed to pay off in three yearly installments to total $270,000. Gaylord has said that the state likely won’t allow the district to carry the lunch debt, even though the towns agreed to pay it.
This has frustrated some of the member towns’ financial planners. Bernardston Finance Committee Chairwoman Jane Dutcher said that the towns may not be legally able to use that money for anything else, now that it has been appropriated for the lunch deficit.
“This is totally inappropriate to think you can change town votes,” Dutcher said.
The special legislation would allow the district to spend at a deficit for the present school year. The money would be included in the total amount of the loan the district receives.
However, under the current revised budget, Gaylord said, the district will not need to spend at a deficit this year.
However, negotiations for teachers’ contracts have not yet been settled. Negotiations began in the spring but were suspended when the deficit was discovered, and have not yet been resumed, and that could throw off this year’s calculations.
Members of the Pioneer Valley Regional Education Association (the teachers union) pointed out at a Thursday school committee meeting that teachers are now working without a contract, and warned the committee that it would not be acceptable to wait to resume negotiations until after the legislation passes, which may not be until the end of December, if at all.
They also criticized the balanced budget that the district is now working with for having no increases in teachers’ salaries.
“We did not create this crisis,” Pioneer Valley Regional School teacher Claire Brennan told the committee on Thursday, on behalf of the union. “We have taken one for the team too many times already.”
Contact Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261 ex 261.