FARMINGTON – The Regional School Unit 9 school board unanimously approved a $33.6 million budget at Tuesday’s meeting, shifting funds to cover increases in special education and district health services relating to three students in the district.
The $33,637,093 budget has the same bottom-line proposed by the board prior to the Sept. 5 budget meeting. More than 300 residents attended that budget meeting and approved, by a roughly 2 to 1 majority, approximately $980,000 in reductions to hold most budget cost centers to the previous fiscal year’s level of funding. The ensuing $32.6 million budget was then defeated at the Sept. 12 validation vote by nearly 1,300 votes.
If approved at the Oct. 11 budget meeting and validated at the Oct. 24 referendum vote, the board’s budget would represent a 2.71 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. It would result in more than a 2 percent decrease in local property tax assessments as compared to the previous fiscal year, or $267,444 less. At least two towns, Farmington and Wilton, have already set tax rates using an education assessment that assumes $33.6 million school budget.
The proposed budget includes a few alterations to encompass changes that have occured since the school year started. As previously reported, two students will need to be placed in an out-of-district private school as their needs cannot be met by RSU 9’s in-district programs. The district will pay the state tuition rate of $50,000 per student for both children, costing $100,000 beyond the previously-proposed Special Education cost center of $5,184,968.
Special Education costs have been one of the central points of discussion of the budget process this year. The budget approved by residents on Sept. 5 included a $545,000 reduction from the proposed budget that school officials said would have needed to be made up elsewhere to satisfy the district’s legal requirement to provide services. In a brief presentation at the beginning of the meeting, Christine Shea, the director of the special education program for the past five years, noted that the district had 16 cases brought against it for not providing adequate services since 2005; in the past five years, the district had only one case brought forward, a statistic Shea said she was proud of.
The district has 389 students receiving special education services, 70 of them considered high needs students. Shea said that the current percentage of special education students compared to the overall student population was 15.5 percent, below the state average of 17.5 percent.
Shea went on to note that RSU 9’s special education budget represented 12.8 percent of the overall budget, while the state average was 16 percent. That state average figures were for 2015-16, the most recent available through the Maine Department of Education data warehouse.
Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Shea said, the district was required to provide notice to ensure that citizens were aware of the availability of district services. That notice is published annually in newspapers.
The $50,000 tuition rate for the two new students is set by the state. Shea said that the district utilized self-contained programs such as Adaptive Life Skills and Day Treatment to minimize the number of students that had to be placed out-of-district.
“It’s an absolute honor to work for those students and their families,” Shea said.
A second, unanticipated expense falls under the district health services component of the Student and Staff Support cost center. Due to a physician’s instructions for a student, Superintendent Tom Ward said, a part-time nurse will need to be added to the budget at the cost of $26,000.
To counter the increase, directors approved a reduction of $48,000 in heating oil and diesel fuel lines. The reduction was possible due to the good rates the district had gotten, Ward said, but would leave RSU 9 with no additional funding should some emergency occur. Specifically, $12,800 in heating oil savings would be cut from the Operations and Maintenance cost center, while $35,200 in diesel savings would be cut out of the Transportation cost center.
An additional $78,000 was cut out of the district’s budgeted contingency funds to cover the difference, leaving RSU 9 with $67,000 budgeted for unanticipated expenses.
The school board unanimously approved both increases, but Director Ryan Morgan of Farmington voted against both reductions for the same reason. The district was letting down students, he argued, by reducing available contingency funds and increasing the chance of another budget freeze. For the past three years, Ward has frozen school supply expenditures, except for those deemed essential to the teaching of core curriculum, to make up for unexpected expenses in the Special Education department relating to new, incoming students. This has meant that teachers and other staff members, such as librarians, have not generally been able to access all of their budgeted supply lines.
Director Cherieann Harrison of Wilton pointed out that the district was now further into the school year than previous budget processes, and therefore there were theoretically fewer unknowns.
Directors did not express any real consideration for not including the additional expenditures in the new budget. Director Scott Erb of Farmington said that the district needed to be upfront and transparent in how it budgeted, which meant including costs, such as the $100,000 expenditure in special education, when they became known. Director Doug Dunlap of Farmington and other directors agreed that known costs had to be included in the budget.
“That’s the cost of the car,” Dunlap said of the special education expenditure.
Directors generally spoke in defense of the budget, which several noted had been cut prior to the previous budget meeting. Chair Jennifer Zweig Hebert said that while the budget as proposed was up less than 3 percent, the student population had increased 3.5 percent, or by 75 students. Director Angela LeClair of Wilton said that while the budget was $33.6 million in total, only $12 million was being funded locally, while the district’s per pupil costs remained at the low end for the state.
“We’re doing a really good job here,” LeClair said.
Residents that spoke prior to board deliberations spoke to the importance of funding education within the district; out of 12 speakers, 10 spoke in favor of funding different aspects of the district. The 11th, Elaine Graham of Farmington, asked questions about special education figures that led into Shea’s presentation. Another speaker, a ballot-counting volunteer at previous budget meetings, suggested issuing colored cards to assist in the tabulation of hand-count votes.
Gregory Baxter, a 2015 graduate, said that the music teachers at RSU 9 had led him to his current major. “Without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” Baxter said.
The vote to approve the $33.6 million was unanimous, with all 16 directors in favor. The budget is effectively a recommendation that will appear before residents at the next district-wide budget meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 11, at 6:30 p.m. at Mt. Blue Campus. Articles will be open, allowing for residents in attendance to either increase or decrease the school budget.
Whatever budget is approved out of that meeting will proceed to a validation vote on Tuesday, Oct. 24 in all 10 towns.
Tuesday’s meeting can be viewed in its entirety, here.
