BF voters OK rest of school budget
Toolbox
By Susan Smallheer Staff Writer - Published: May 13, 2009
BELLOWS FALLS – Voters approved the second part of the town's $9.1 million school budget Tuesday on a 384-235 tally, which will mean an 11 percent increase in school taxes.
Voters had defeated the additional $561,000 in spending in March, and the Rockingham School Board cut close to $200,000 from the budget to regain voters' confidence, who passed the additional $367,342 in spending.
Even with the cuts, school taxes in Rockingham are slated to go up 11 percent more than the past year, thanks to increased spending, a substantial deficit that had to be paid off and declining revenues attributed largely to declining enrollment of tuition students.
With only 619 of the town's eligible 3,437 voters casting ballots, school officials waited for the results to be announced by Rockingham Town Clerk Doreen Aldrich.
School Board Chairman Charlie Jarras gave a shout and there were smiles all around.
Voters had approved the basic school budget in March, but a new state law, Act 82, required any budget increase more than 4 percent to go before the voters in a separate article. Rockingham and Springfield were two of only a handful of towns whose spending exceeded the 4 percent increase and both saw the supplemental budgets defeated the first time around.
"I'm very happy, the vote passed," said Jarras, who said "a lot of people" in town were concerned about the rate of spending in Rockingham schools.
"The board is listening to those concerns," Jarras said, noting the board would take a tough approach to spending next year.
Part of the cuts resulted when the school district's top administrators agreed to take a 1 percent pay cut, Jarras said. The School Board asked Rockingham teachers to agree to a 1 percent wage cut, but they refused, Jarras said.
The board also found savings in its fuel oil account, and cut some transportation services and special education.
"We were able to lock in a good deal," he said of the fuel oil prices, at $1.80 a gallon, by joining with the town and other surrounding communities.
"We got a good deal," he said.
And the School Board sent back its annual stipends, Jarras said, which for the chairman was $700 a year and each School Board member $600.
If the supplemental budget had been defeated, Jarras said, the board would have had to cut staff. "There would have been deep cuts," he said.
Jarras said the school district will struggle with high costs until it decides what to do about its middle school. A district committee is currently studying possible solutions, including joining with Westminster to create a new union school district for its seventh- and eighth-graders. A new middle school would be built at the high school under one scenario, he said.
"Our problem is revenues," he said, noting that many sending towns, such as Grafton, Athens and Westminster, are sending their middle school student elsewhere. Rockingham and those towns currently are in a high school union district only.
The town got less for special education and it over-estimated the number of tuition students coming to the Bellows Falls Middle School, he said.
Conversely, another possible solution is to tuition Rockingham's 240 middle school students to another school, he said.
susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com
28