To keep next year’s school budget increase below 3 percent, school administrators have cut more than $90,000 from their original request to taxpayers. Superintendent Linda Dwight reported the new numbers to the School Committee at its Nov. 23 meeting.
About half the savings comes from tapping funding sources other than local tax revenues, such as the Shaw Trust ($8,445 for fitness equipment) and circuit-breaker funds ($40,000 in expected state reimbursement for higher-than-usual special education costs). The other half comes from actual reductions.
Among those reductions are cutting back on the number of computers to be replaced this year (saving $20,000), reducing the purchase of graphing calculators (saving $5,000), and hiring only one kindergarten aide instead of two (saving $12,000). About $5,000 was also pared from the school maintenance budget, with the largest item cut being a new computer for managing the HVAC system (saving $3,500).
Taken together, these cuts reduce the school funding request that will appear in the town’s next omnibus budget from nearly $12.7 million to just over $12.6 million. The year-to-year percentage increase falls from 3.54 percent to 2.7 percent.
The new totals, however, do not include any changes that the School Committee might make to user fees for busing and athletics. The committee expects to reach a decision on those fees at its Dec. 14 meeting.
