Dr. David Hopson
12 Littleville Rd
Huntington, MA 01050

Please visit the district website.

January 14, 2008

On Wednesday January 23rd, I will be presenting Version 1.0 of the 2008-2009 budget (FY’09) to the School Committee. As I have been saying all along, it is my intent to present a budget that holds the average town assessment to less than 5%. Essentially, this means holding the overall increase in the bottom line to roughly 2.5%--a $450,000 reduction from a level-service budget.

To refresh everyone’s memory, a level-service budget sustains all our existing programs and staff in the coming year. For FY’09, that would mean increasing the total budget by over $830,000. Most years we also add high priority items to the budget, which historically means that the budget presented to the towns starts at the level of services from the prior year and then adds items that are deemed necessary to meet student needs.

A level-funded budget simply expends the same amount of funds from one year to another, essentially requiring that we cut services to meet a monetary target. In any year, going to a level-funded budget means cutting across the board in order to meet increases in fixed costs such as insurance and utilities. For FY’09 a level-funded budget would cut $830,000 in services from this year’s budget.

What we are presenting as Version 1.0 is a budget above level-funding by $380,000 but below level-service by $450,000. As I’ve mentioned before, this is only possible because several staff members are retiring and--due to decreasing student enrollment—many of these positions are not being filled. There are costs to doing this: moving a second elementary school to a multi-aged footing, having two schools be single tracked from Kindergarten to fourth grade, and decreasing staffing at the middle and high schools (although without greatly increasing class sizes). This is not something we can do routinely but, given the general uncertainty in the economy and the difficulties our towns are having making ends meet, this seemed like a reasonable direction to take for FY’09.

In a meeting last week of Pioneer Valley Superintendents there were a number of school districts that will be seeking budget increases well above Gateway’s 2½%, with some even going into the double digits. Without decreasing staffing, our budget would have increased nearly 6%. We certainly hope that the legislators and the Governor ensure that educational aide does not decrease next year and that the smaller and more rural districts like Gateway continue to be ‘held harmless’ for decreasing student enrollments (i.e., our total aid doesn’t decrease even if we have fewer students).

I hope that by being extraordinarily careful and scaling back wherever possible we can create budgets for the next two years that are affordable to the towns without decreasing student opportunities. The key to surviving long-term is to have the state develop a more reasonable formula for determining educational aid and then funding that formula so that no school is left behind. In the interim, I implore each of you to ask your representative and senator to support fully funding regional transportation in the FY’09 state budget. I’m sure that working together we will meet student needs within town means for the 2008-2009 school year. Please feel free to attend school committee meetings to learn more about the developing FY’09 budget. As soon as information is shared with the committee, it will be placed on the district’s website (www.grsd.org/).

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