Capital Committee approves school requests
School Committee Chairman Keith Cheveralls announced that the Capital Planning and Investment Committee had approved all the school requests for the upcoming fiscal year. Included were $65,000 for the new playground at the Hildreth Elementary School; $100,000 for mechanical upgrades and improvements for energy efficiency; $30,000 for converting the Bromfield School from oil to natural gas; $15,000 to connect Bromfield House to the town water/sewer system; and $10,000 for new carpeting at the elementary school. While the Capital Committee approved the requests, final funding for some of these projects may eventually come from the monies supplied under the Green Communities program.
School Committee to consider user fees again
Resident Stu Sklar, as a member of the Bromfield School Council, presented the School Committee with a draft list of student user fees. Sklar noted that the list, while not yet complete, is an effort to include all costs to families—academic, athletic, and extracurricular. Fees for participating in sports range from $285 (cross country) to $750 (hockey, jointly with Littleton). The bus fee is $225 per child, with a family cap of $600. Other costly activities are the Model UN, at $390, and the ninth-grade trip to Washington, D.C., at $685, as both include travel and hotel expenses. The school charges $84 apiece for most advanced-placement textbooks. Drama, band, and the math team all add to the costs of participation for high-schoolers.
School Committee member Virginia Justicz suggested that it will be important to see what the fees amount to in total, as well as looking at the cost to individuals, to get a truer picture of the part fees play in the school budget. Cheveralls mentioned that the committee might consider a policy of allocating a percentage of school funds from the omnibus budget to support extracurricular activities. But he emphasized that this was merely a preliminary discussion and no funding source was linked to this idea as yet. “I don’t know what we can do, or if we can do, or when we can do,” he said, “but we have to have this discussion.”
