School committee approves town council voted budget figure

The school committee approved the FY27 budget figure adopted by the town council in the overall town operating budget at its meeting on Monday night.

The final figure approved by the school committee of just under $41.3 million is about $1.2 million less than the $42.5 million figure it passed earlier in the spring. 

At Monday night’s school committee meeting, Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard said closing the budget gap will be an ongoing effort, but that it should not lead to current filled positions being cut or an increase in class sizes.

“With the appropriated budget, it is my job to go back and take a look at the level-service budget and figure out if there are any reductions that we can make,” said Howard. “It is still not the opportune time to do that, because we have not closed out FY26, which means that we are not sure if we are going to have funds left in FY26 to prepay any acceptable prepay items (for FY27). However, in order for the school budget to open, I have to go through that process and reduce the lines to get the budget equal with the appropriation from the town.”

However, once the FY26 school year and budget is closed out, Howard said she will be able to go back into the budget and use some of the funds not fully expended by the schools and start to make some of the prepays and turn back any of the cuts or reductions that were made.

“It is important to understand these reductions were based on lots of discussion and lots of pre-work that was done,” said Howard. “We were conservative with our increases, but we also have actuals from this year. So if we go back to the actuals from this year and increase it slightly under three percent, we were able to shave it down a little bit.”

Howard said if the items that were reduced are actually headed in a different direction in the fall, then the school committee’s budget subcommittee would have to meet and determine if the schools would need to go back to the town council for a supplemental appropriation from the town council through either a supplemental appropriation or asking for access to the stabilization fund.

“Ideally, we do not want to do that at all, because we want to have that money for the FY28 budget,” Howard said. “But it is a step-by-step, month-by-month process. I feel confident in some of these reductions, but my confidence today could change tomorrow.”

The superintendent said the FY27 budget is the tightest she has faced in the nine years she has been in the position.

“Paying attention to the budget on a weekly basis is going to be extraordinarily important so that we know when the appropriate time is for us to come back and come to the budget subcommittee and discuss any next steps that we have to take,” said Howard.

In order to reduce the budget by $1.2 million, she said the administration tried to look at bigger ticket items to see if there were reductions that could lessen the impact.

Some of the reductions Howard highlighted to the school committee included reductions to transportation maintenance, special education legal, special education translation, and homeless transportation costs.

“Homeless transportation was set at $40,000; we reduced it to $20,000 and we’re looking at utilizing homeless transportation reimbursement as it is coming in next year to mitigate that,” said Howard. “Special education tuition, we are looking at flattening the circuit breaker funds that we have not (that) have not yet eaten into incoming funds. However, we have two spending registrations of students from the collaborative, so that may impact that, but also, someone may move, so we are watching that closely.”

Howard said the town was charging about $550,000 for special education tuition, and is adding about $360,000 from the circuit breaker to that.

Additionally, Howard said there is some money left in an IT support system revolving account that can be used toward the budget. The reductions also include a reduction in the district’s group health insurance line.

“That is sort of a big gamble for us, but those numbers are never exactly the same as they were the year before, so we are hopeful that those will come in,” said Howard.

There were also several cuts to salary lines, including cutting a computer technician position that worked for the district the year before the current school year but was not filled this year.

In addition, Howard said the line item for the special education summer program salaries was cut to reflect the actual level of service of the program.

There were also several adjustments made to salary line items based on revolving accounts and the potential salaries of teachers coming into the district for the new school year.