AMHERST — Two formulas that could determine how much each of the four towns that make up the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District will pay toward the region’s fiscal year 2020 budget will be presented at a meeting Saturday morning.
Representatives from Amherst, Pelham, Shutesbury and Leverett will convene at 9 a.m. at the high school cafeteria, where Sean Mangano, the school finance director, told the Amherst Finance Committee this week that he will explain two “assessment method” options.
Those options would be used in place of what is known as the statutory, or default method, for allocating assessments to each town.
A Regional Assessment Method Working Group has been working on this subject for several years as officials in each town debate how much their communities should be asked to contribute.
Last year, a methodology was developed that includes a factor for how wealthy each community is and how many students each is sending to the district’s schools, both based on five-year averages. This formula for the fiscal year 2019 budget was calculated as 20 percent of the statutory method, with the remainder allocated on a five-year rolling average of enrollment, with a small portion based on property values in each town.
Mangano said the feedback from the larger group will determine the viability of the formulas. The estimated increase in the assessment for each town should be around 1.8 percent, based on the amount of state aid, he said.
Finance Committee Chairman Andy Steinberg told his colleagues, who all serve on the Amherst Town Council, that developing a formula is a “balancing act” as no town wants to face financial difficulties from the assessment method, and if the formula is unreasonable it could require a cut in the regional budget.
Though there could be some difficulty with the formula, Mangano said the outlook for the budget is better than last year, when challenges, driven by rising healthcare costs, forced the elimination of the long-running culinary and preschool programs at the high school, and the move of the Summit Academy from its South Amherst campus to the classrooms in the high school previously used by those programs.
“It’s set up to be a good budget year, if we can find agreement on the assessment method,” Mangano said.
At January’s Regional School Committee meeting, Mangano reported that the proposed budget is $32.23 million, which is $414,842, or 1.3 percent higher, than this year’s $31.82 million budget. The budget includes $429,092 more for teacher salaries and $22,491 more for substitutes, as well as $57,100 in net additions for special education and English language instruction
The budget benefits from lower than expected health insurance costs and a reduction in the amount the district will be spending on charter, choice and vocational school budgets.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
