GRANBY — When Town Meeting resumes Monday, voters will be asked to approve a proposed budget that school officials say will lead to a significant shortfall.
Some 20 teachers have been notified that their jobs may be reduced or eliminated next year, potentially resulting in the loss of the equivalent of 12.4 full-time positions, including administrators and other staff.
Students walked out of the Granby Junior/Senior High School during the lunch hour on Monday and a second demonstration was held there Thursday seeking to draw attention to the layoffs and to the condition of education in town.
And that has resulted in some residents suggesting that the town explore a regional high school with Belchertown.
The Finance Committee is recommending a total town budget of a little over $19.2 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1. That is down by 6.5 percent from the current year’s expenditures of $20.5 million.
Town Meeting will consider the budget when it meets at 7 p.m. Monday in the Junior/Senior High School.
The amount budgeted for education, including Granby’s contribution to the Pathfinder Regional Technical High School is $8,678,768, down 4.7 percent from the current year’s figure of $9,110,319. Of that total, $8,334,667 is budgeted for the schools in Granby, down 5.6 percent from this year’s figure of $8,825,945.
Andrew Paquette, president of The Management Solution and a consultant to the schools, said Monday that a level-funded budget for the schools for next year would be $9.3 million.
Finance Committee Chairman John Libera Jr. said Wednesday that, given the current tax rate, the town can’t afford to give the schools enough money to maintain services at current levels.
Enrollment is down 18.4 percent over the last five years, triggering a significant loss in state aid, while at the same time, operational expenses have gone up by 5.6 percent, mostly due to increased costs for special needs students, according to the Finance Committee.
This comes at a time when parents, students and other community members are up in arms about the dramatic drop in funding.
Sharon Bail, who is among those who organized Thursday’s demonstration, said even if Town Meeting approves more money for the schools than the Finance Committee recommends, “There is no way that we can save all the positions and we are looking at a pretty significant loss of teachers.”
Bail added that Granby’s problem is worsened because “our town is suffering pretty significantly this year because of factors like the loss of the dump revenue.”
The town’s finances took a hit two years ago when a privately owned landfill, operated by Waste Management, which took refuse from surrounding communities, was forced to close because it was full.
Over the course of its two-decade lifespan, the landfill produced $23 million in revenue for the town, said Libera, who has chaired the Finance Committee since the early 1990s. During the last five years of its operation, when it became evident there was no more room for expansion, the Finance Committee was able to put about $2 million a year into the town’s stabilization fund.
That ability “disappeared two years ago,” said Libera.
In a statement accompanying this year’s budget, the Finance Committee said, “It seems clear that the current model of educating all the students in town school buildings and offering many courses in small settings cannot be sustained under current financial constraints.”
During Town Meeting on Monday, voters will have the opportunity to take some money out of the stabilization fund to help preserve some of the programs and positions being lost. That would take a two-thirds vote.
Libera said another option is for Town Meeting to approve a Proposition 2½ override by majority vote, which would then go to a townwide vote to raise more taxes.
Either way, Libera said, “It is very hard for a small town to cover the general overhead that goes with” operating the schools. Granby has about 6,000 residents.
The loss of the landfill not only meant less money in tax revenue, but also resulted in Granby having to pass a $300,000 Proposition 2½ override to pay to dispose of its residents’ trash — a service that had been free for 20 years, according to Libera. “That was a double whammy,” he said.
Libera said all town departments have been asked to limit their spending increases for next year to 2 percent plus step increases for employees where relevant.
He said the school budget is down next year in part because it got money from the stabilization fund this year.
“Last year the schools asked for a special one-time extra of almost $361,000,” Libera explained. “The Finance Committee agreed, but said that’s the last time you should be taking money out of the stabilization.”
He added that the schools “want more money than current tax rates would allow on an ongoing basis. You can do it for a year or two, but you can’t run an operation that way.”
The two reasons the town’s overall budget is down next year is that this year’s spending included more capital expenditures and a warrant article to add $900,000 to the stabilization fund — which will not continue going forward, Libera said.
Granby voters in March approved a $34.2 million project to renovate the East Meadow School and to construct a new building next to it to replace the West Street School. Both are for elementary education.
That required a Proposition 2½ debt exclusion override vote for the town’s portion of the project, which is $16.6 million. The Massachusetts School Building Authority will pay the rest.
The estimated tax impact of that vote for the average home in Granby, which is valued at just under $230,000, will be about $340 annually.
Bail said one idea residents are talking about is to ask Belchertown if it would agree to regionalize with Granby at the high school level.
Libera said that is a proposal he also has heard. It is not up to him, he said, to tell the School Committee how to adjust to budget cuts going forward, but, “that’s the sort of idea we hoped the School Committee might have been pursuing over the past few years but as far as we know, nothing has really happened.”
School Committee Chairman Emre Evren said Thursday that the board is “is not actively seeking regionalization at this time,” but that it could be an option in the future. “We are not taking anything off the table.”
Evren said that unlike the Finance Committee, which is looking at the problem from a financial perspective, “We are looking at all the options from an educational quality perspective … we are looking at the pros and cons of different kinds of solutions.”
Newly appointed Superintendent Sheryl Stanton said she has heard talk of seeking to regionalize with another town, but that if it were to be considered, that would be “a long-term and lengthy process that we would not go into lightly.”
If such a plan were to gain momentum, Stanton added, it would take at least three years. “It’s not a short-term solution to the problems we have now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Bail said she wants to continue pressuring the state to increase aid for local schools even though she does not think it will solve Granby’s budget crisis this year.
“My feeling is that you have to start making noise and you have to make noise again and again and again, so I see this as a first step and I hope other towns will pick up on it,” said Bail.
She said organizers are also soliciting support from local legislators. “I hope that people will plague the heck out of their representatives in Boston and that (this issue) will get more attention,” she said.
Bail also described the student walkout on Monday, which she said started “in stages” during the lunch hour, but “by the end of it the entire student body was outside, flagging down traffic and waving signs.”
The students “are losing a significant number of their teachers and they are not OK with that,” said Bail. “They really care and they are not willing to sit there and do nothing and watch all these teachers lose their jobs and see their school, which is already a bare-bones school, go down the toilet.”
Eric Goldscheider can be reached at eric.goldscheider@gmail.com.