School Committee discusses budget
Beach questions Selectmen’s decision to charge school for water use
By Melissa Fales
Turley Publications Reporter
WARE – Superintendent Mary-Elizabeth Beach told the School Committee at their Dec. 10 meeting that she is circulating a preliminary draft of the fiscal year 2010 budget among the administrative staff senior team. Beach said she has asked for a 10% reduction from each cost center. “It’s someplace to start,” Beach said.
Andrew Paquette of The Management Solution explained a recent letter from Department of Elementary and Secondary Education stating that the town did not meet the state’s minimum school spending requirement in fiscal year 2008.
Paquette said he believes that part of the problem stems from an error where despite a 1993 town meeting vote to not include retirees’ insurance in net school spending, those costs were included. Paquette explained that because money from the school’s budget was used to pay the insurance it was not spent on the school. According to Paquette, the problem grew cumulatively over a period of years, with the amount not spent each year rolled over into the next fiscal year. The amount totaled approximately $28,000 at the end of fiscal year 2008.
Paquette said that the town is currently not on track to meet the minimum net school spending amount for fiscal year 2009. He estimated that with the $28,000 rolled over, plus additional offsets, that the school will be approximately $104,000 under the minimum school spending level for this fiscal year.
Paquette said that he and Town Accountant Tracy Meehan are in the process of verifying these figures and have made changes to the accounting system for the future. He said that in the past, funding sources to the school were all bunched together under one budget line, but they have now separated out each budget item. “We’re accounting…the way it should be,” Paquette said. He added that a separate article to raise and appropriate the approximate $104,000 to increase the Ware Public Schools budget for the fiscal year 2009 budget will likely appear on the warrant for the annual town meeting in the spring.
Beach said that Ware is not alone in this situation and warned that the state might say that towns who do not meet the net school spending minimums are not eligible for grants. She said that the state allows for a 5% window, but that if the town drops below the 95% funding, the state reduces the amount that it will give to the town the next year by that percentage. Beach said that the new transparency of the accounting process on both the town and school sides should make this kind of error impossible in the future. “We hope that we can go forward correctly,” she said.
Beach also announced the Board of Selectmen’s decision to charge the school district for its water use. Paquette estimated that the school uses approximately $3600 worth of water annually, with _ of that going towards maintaining the athletic fields.
Beach said she would ask the policy sub-committee to reconsider the district’s current policy of not charging the town for using the facility for various events including annual town meetings and Finance Committee meetings. “What goes around comes around,” Beach said.
Beach said she understood that the town was facing a large projected budget shortfall but thought this was the wrong approach. “This is not a one-way street,” Beach said. “We are indeed paying our fair share.”
School Committee member Patricia Goudreau asked if there was any way to determine how much money the school generates for the town. Beach said that it would be difficult to figure, but that the interest the school generates alone is considerable.
Beach said that the town had not singled out the school system, but had voted to charge all municipal buildings for water. School Committee Chairman Christopher Desjardins said the schools are in a different position. “The other departments don’t have 1200 people marching through the doors every day,” Desjardins said.
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