FARMINGTON – The Mt. Blue Regional School District school board approved an assistant coaching stipend and a new copier lease at Tuesday’s meeting, prior to discussing the Special Services budget.
The assistant coach will be used at Mt. Blue Middle School, working with the Track and Field program. According to Katie Duchesne, the MBMS athletic director/assistant principal, that program has seen significant growth since the 6th grade moved to the middle school. Track and Field doesn’t cut athletes, unlike other sports, and Duchesne projected approximately 75 students participating in the coming spring season.
Track and Field currently has two coaches, both of whom approached Duchesne with their concerns about player safety given the large number of participants. The school board unanimously approved hiring an assistant coach for the program. The cost is $1,000 for the stipend, with those funds coming out of the co-extra curricular line.
The board also approved a copier lease agreement with US Bank, buying out two leases that would have expired in 2018. The district will receive 11 new copiers, replacing 11 copiers with the highest meter counts. The cost of the copiers is $170,000 leased at 3.763 percent.
As the two leases being bought out had annual payments totaling $47,500, Business Manager Kris Pottle said, and the new lease had an annual payment of $37,000, the district would save roughly $10,500 for the next two years. That reduction has yet to be included in the 2017-18 proposed budget, Pottle noted.
The board voted unanimously to authorize Superintendent Thomas Ward to lease purchase the copiers.
The board also continued their review of the budget, hearing presentations on proposed expenditures for Special Services and Career and Technical Education. Preliminarily proposed expenditures has the Special Services budget increasing by $403,000 to $5 million. The increase includes additional ed tech positions, as well as moving ed techs working one-on-one with Adaptive Skills students from part- to full-time. Part of the issue, Special Services Director Christine Shea said, was that the part-time ed techs didn’t have enough time in their shift to be with students the entire school day.
Additional ed tech positions represent an attempt to meet the needs of approximately $300,000 of Special Service students that moved into the district after the start of the 2016-17 school year. It’s an issue that Ward said the district deals with every day, noting that the sudden influxes of students “kills the budget.”
The district froze non-critical expenditures in January to help pay for the additional cost this year. Ward has advocated for the development of a state-level “circuit breaker,” a program that would help fund unanticipated influxes of Special Service students into districts; a proposal he made to the state’s Blue Ribbon Commission on the state education funding formula. Additionally, the district now bills MaineCare for its day treatment program and the board will hear a presentation on adding Life Skills to that process later this year.
Curious: this additional $300,000 for the influx of students needing special services is how many actual new students?
$ 170,000 for eleven copiers ?? Holy Smokes …. How many copiers can you buy for $ 1,000 – $ 1,500 each. What is the need to spend over $ 15,000 on each copier ? Do employees use them for private use ? Why are they “color copiers” ? No wonder our taxes are through the roof.
The new lease also buys out two existing leases. It’s for more than 11 copiers.
$1000-$1500 for a copier? Are you insane? Or perhaps living in the past? You clearly have no concept of how expensive these machines are including purchase, upkeep, and maintenance fees. We’re talking extremely heavy use, thousands of pages a day. This is a school, not an office building.
How about buying copiers instead of renting them? Buy some insurance on them, if available. Or, better yet, buy the copiers 2nd hand from Ebay
We all should be glad students use laptops to help cut down on paper copies.(sarcasm).Just another example of why our taxes increase.
UMF also leases copiers. From what I understand the cost is more if you buy and pay for upkeep than it is for leasing, especially since copiers have a limited life span. Buying used from e-bay would probably mean getting copiers that need excessive service. That not only costs money, but then you lose the copier when people need it. There is a reason why businesses, schools and organizations increasingly lease rather than purchase – it costs less.