/

School board adds teaching positions, looks to E-Rate funds to reduce tech costs

7 mins read
Mt. Blue Regional School District directors discuss the 2015-16 budget. From left to right is Director Nancy Crosby of Weld, Director Tami Labul of Farmington, Director Betsy Hyde of Temple, Director Angela LeClair of Wilton, Board Vice Chair Claire Andrews and Board Chair Mark Prentiss.
Mt. Blue Regional School District directors discuss the 2015-16 budget. Pictured, from left to right is Director Nancy Crosby of Weld, Director Tami Labul of Farmington, Director Betsy Hyde of Temple, Director Angela LeClair of Wilton, Board Vice Chair Claire Andrews of Farmington and Board Chair Mark Prentiss of Industry.

FARMINGTON – School board directors in the Mt. Blue Regional School District began the process of setting the 2015-16 budget Tuesday evening, adding one and a half teaching positions and looking to E-rate funding to help pay for student laptop insurance.

The board began the budget process more than a month ago, considering a draft budget prepared by administrators and a finance committee. That $32.3 million budget was reduced by $70,000 last week, after directors learned that health insurance costs would be decreasing by 1.67 percent. As a result, administrators were able to pull $201,000 out of the proposed budget. Offsetting that decrease is the proposed hiring of five new ed techs: one Ed Tech III at Cape Cod Hill School due to a large, multi-grade class; two Ed Tech IIIs at W.G. Mallett School for students with special needs that are expected to enroll within the district, and two Ed Tech IIs at G.D. Cushing School due to Child Development Services students that are expected to enroll within the district.

Tuesday evening, directors began reviewing $32,199,188 in expenditures, including the $70,000 reduction from the budget considered at the beginning of April. That would represent an increase of 3.73 percent over the current fiscal year’s budget.

The draft budget already included an additional Cascade Brook School teacher. However, with that school anticipating a large number of incoming students, directors supported adding a second, additional teacher for $57,500. The vote was relatively close, with some directors questioning whether those funds should be held out of the budget to reduce the tax impact or allocated elsewhere, but the measure passed by a weighted vote count of 517 to 433.

Another addition was a part-time science teaching position at Mt. Blue Campus. With the number of students interested in taking courses, and the difficulty in scheduling of science classes and their associated lab periods, the high school would likely have been unable to offer the Anatomy and Physiology elective and would have turned away freshmen and sophomores interested in taking Engineering and Design. While scheduling will be up to the building’s administrators, the half-time position would allow those three sections to be taught to approximately 50 to 60 students.

Directors spent some time discussing whether to exchange Ed Tech IIs at Cape Cod Hill School for Ed Tech IIIs with more hours. Those three positions are responsible for assisting the CCHS teachers in teaching three, multi-grade classes. The draft budget includes funds to increase those positions to Ed Tech III, allowing them to assist in lesson planning, and have them go from 5.5 hours a day to 6.5. Those extra hours, which would extend health and dental benefits to the ed techs, are part of Superintendent Thomas Ward’s plan to incrementally improve the positions in a bid to reduce the Ed Tech turnover rate.

“We spend all this time training these people,” Ward said, “and then we lose them.”

Directors made one cut and another decision that would reduce the tax impact of the budget. The draft had contained approximately $11,000 to go from a 75 percent to a full-time guidance counseling position at CCHS. While expansion of that position had been recommended by the finance committee as the school moves to a new tier of the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports system, the majority of directors felt that the ratio of 75 percent of a counselor to 179 students was adequate.

Directors also approved using more than $36,000 of E-Rate funds to go toward the $72,000 cost of insuring student laptops. That would allow all students the freedom of bringing the laptops home, with both administrators and directors calling the issue one of fairness. According to Technology Director Darcy Dunphy, approximately 200 students are currently not buying the $70 insurance and therefore unable to take their laptops home to do homework.

E-Rate funds, which are provided by the state under the oversight of the Federal Communications Commission to schools and libraries, are used in MBRSD to pay for equipment leases and for professional development. After a “frugal” year, according to Dunphy, the district had saved up approximately $58,000 in E-Rate funds. Using $36,000 of that to pay for laptop insurance would pull that cost out of the locally-funded budget.

The draft budget already includes funds to give the sixth-grade laptops, as those students are now at the middle school with seventh and eighth graders. A $24,570 lease-purchase program over a 4-year period would buy laptops for the sixth grade, which currently use cart-mounted machines that are wheeled from class to class. Those computers would replace 8-year-old models at the lower grades; an update that administrators noted was necessary to run computer-based standardized testing.

Directors will begin discussing other budget cost centers, including Special Education, at Thursday’s meeting, beginning at 6 p.m. in The Forum on the Mt. Blue Campus.  The administration has been aiming for a June 1 district-wide meeting to set the budget, although the board has yet to set the date of the meeting. A confirmation referendum would follow, with voters asked if they approve of the action taken at the budget meeting.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

4 Comments

  1. Remember now directors…. No increase will be tolerated,,,,a 3% decrease will be acceptable …. The district and its employees must learn to work with less, just like the folks that fund it…For a generation now, we have dealt with less and less money, while the school budget has grown exponentiallly….enough is enough….remember now folks…we are in the business of educating our children, not keeping people employed..

  2. You got it Over Governed,

    They are in the business of educating our children.

  3. More money does not provide better education! More money for salaries does not provide for better education! I agree that we are not in the business of providing a life long employment. The bottom line is when the budget comes to a vote I urge everyone, please VOTE VOTE VOTE. Once again like kids in a candy store, we need to separate the Wants from the NEEDS

  4. Electricity goes up, sewer goes up, oil goes up, prices on supplies go up.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.