NORTHFIELD — Pioneer Valley Regional School District’s budget will remain at its current total of $14,067,538 through the 2019 fiscal year, if the School Committee’s proposed budget is passed on Thursday.
“We looked at where we could cut to come out to a level-funded budget,” District Superintendent Ruth Miller said at the budget hearing in the Pioneer Valley Regional School auditorium last week.
The School Committee will vote on this budget proposal Thursday at Pioneer Valley Regional School. Then three out of the four district towns — Bernardston, Leyden, Northfield and Warwick — will need to pass the budget at their individual annual town meetings.
“This budget does not represent any extravagance,” said Elizabeth Musgrave, principal of Warwick Community School. “To take it down lower will be to cut the quality of what we can give the children because we have truly stretched, and we do every day. Happily we stretch, but we do stretch.”
Although the bottom line looks to remain unchanged, certain elements of the plan prompted lengthy discussions among residents and committee members, especially the proposed costs of improving the schools’ computer equipment.
Attendees expressed differing opinions on the school’s proposed “One-to-One” program, in which all ninth-graders would have a Chromebook computer that he or she would keep throughout his or her four years of high school. Eventually, every high school student in Pioneer Valley Regional School would have a personal computer.
The budget calls for $35,000 to pay for the Chromebooks.
Residents in favor of the plan argued that technological prowess is essential to the long-term viability of the district’s schools, especially when parents may choose to send their children to other districts’ schools under School Choice. Some suggested that if the district’s public school are not sufficiently competitive with others in the region, young families will no longer be drawn to the district’s towns.
Teachers and committee members mentioned that extra instructional days are lost to MCAS testing as the schools are not sufficiently equipped with computers to administer the tests as efficiently as possible.
Others objected that the district has already been spending too much money on its schools.
“There is more to a community than just a school,” said Stanley Garland, Bernardston Selectboard chairman.
Garland mentioned that Bernardston has a relatively high population of senior citizens, and that many of them are unfairly affected by the school district’s spending.
“Don’t expect your neighbors to spend all of their money on your kids,” Garland said.
While the discussion over Chromebooks was thorough, the money stayed in the proposed budget.
Another element in the budget that produced plenty of discussion was the plan to send Leyden preschool students to Bernardston Elementary School rather than Pearl Rhodes Elementary School.
“When I look at this budget, it doesn’t say it’s a plan to close Pearl Rhodes, but to me it looks like a plan to close Pearl Rhodes,” said Patty Solomon, a teacher at Pearl Rhodes Elementary School, referring to the plan for Leyden’s preschoolers. “It’s like the budget is making the decision for us.”
Although the scheduled talk about Pearl Rhodes’s future was postponed because of Tuesday’s snowstorm, the district budget plan includes sending Leyden preschoolers to Bernardston.
Another cost that drew attention was the for a resource officer, a police officer whose time is divided time between the district’s schools. Committee members encouraged parents to check the Pioneer Valley Regional School District’s website, where daily logs of the resource officer’s activities at the schools can be found.
Superintendent Miller also justified the costs of employing teachers’ aids, assuring attendees that the committee considers such costs to be necessary.