EASTHAMPTON – The School Committee on Tuesday voted to send a $16.5 million proposed budget to the mayor that would create six new positions in city schools.
Mayor Karen L. Cadieux will now consider the budget as she completes the rest of the city’s spending plan for the fiscal year beginning July 1. She can either accept the proposed school budget as is, or cut the overall figure and send it back to the school board.
The proposed budget represents an increase of 2.01 percent, or $326,306, over the current year’s spending plan. It was recommended by a unanimous vote of the School Committee, with members Sarah Hunter and Debora Lusnia were absent.
The proposed new jobs come after the school department was forced to make cuts mid-year in 2009 and the budget was decreased for the following four fiscal years.
“I’m pleased to report this year it appears we’ve turned a corner,” Superintendent Nancy Follansbee said. She said the schools are now looking at a “growth period.”
If the budget is approved by the mayor and City Council, the School Department would hire a second grade teacher and a speech and language pathologist’s assistant to work at the Center/Pepin School; a world language teacher and a part-time reading specialist for White Brook Middle School; a design technology teacher at Easthampton High School; and a behavior analyst who would work throughout the district.
“The positions that we’ve added back are really crucial to the health and the development of the district,” said committee member Cynthia Kwiecinski, who works as a special education teacher in Hatfield.
Savings in the budget were made possible by the retirement of several teachers at the top of the pay scale, a renegotiation of service contracts such as those for postage and copy machines and a fewer number of long-term teachers set to receive a contracted longevity bonus next year, Follansbee told the Gazette.
But the school spending picture is not without challenges.
Committee member Peter T. Gunn noted that the district paid $570,600 for tuition to Smith Vocational and Agricultural High Schoolin fiscal year 2014 and $923,094 in the current fiscal year – a 61 percent increase – though the same number of Easthampton students attended the school in those two years.
Follansbee said that vocational school tuition is set by the state, and though the state has decreased the cost for the next fiscal year, Smith Vocational has requested a waiver to allow it to charge the same amount as it does currently.
And the number of Easthampton students who attend charter schools has increased by nearly 89 percent since 2012. The city this fiscal year is paying $729,162 in tuition for 96 students who attend charter schools.
Gunn pointed out that the majority of that increase came from students leaving the district to attend Hilltown Cooperative Charter Public School after it moved to the city in 2014, citing district data.
But on a positive note on choice and charter tuition, Follansbee said that the number of students attending Easthampton schools who live in other communities increased 30 percent since the 2012 fiscal year – bringing with them $467,402 in tuition payments this year. And the number of city children opting out of Easthampton schools for other public districts has decreased by about 11 percent since 2012, though that cost still represents a major drain on city funds. This year it paid $1.1 million in school choice tuition for 173 students.
Dayle Doiron, the interim school business director, said that the proposed spending plan is an “essential services budget” rather than just providing the same level of services as this year – meaning that the budget has “all that is necessary” to serve students well.
“We didn’t simply seek to replicate the services we had this year,” she said. “We spent a lot of time talking about what we believe is essential in a school budget and what our needs are.”
Officials had high praise for Doiron’s leadership in the budget process. Doiron started in her current role last year.
Doiron reconsidered the way line items are categorized and simplified the budget’s structure, including categorizing spending by school.
“We thought that that framework made it more transparent and easily understood” and makes it easier to manage for school leaders, Doiron said.
That new way of structuring the budget makes it appear on paper that Maple School and special education spending have been decreased because the salaries of staff who split time between schools are now paid proportionally out of each school’s budget. “I really wanted to stress very strongly that is not because there’s a reduction in staffing or service,” Doiron said.
Gunn, who has served on the board for a decade, called the structure a “significant improvement.”
Cadieux also lauded Doiron’s work, calling the budget consideration process “refreshing” compared to other years.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com.