Warrant Article 4 - Operating Budget

The district administration, school board, and budget committee spent a lot of time going over the budget this year (as usual), and have come up with a responsible budget that I support.

The operating budget spending is less than I would actually prefer from a programs perspective, but the impact on taxes is high due to low state adequacy aid, that we need to be very tight this year.

We follow a process for budget development that seems to work fairly well. These are the main steps of the process:

* The school board decides whether to set a bottom-line number up front, or to wait to see what is presented before deciding on a number. We have chosen to use the wait and see approach in recent years, and this has worked well since the administration has made good faith efforts at developing responsible budgets.

* Administrators responsible for various areas of the budget develop their first pass at the budget. The Superintendent gives them guidelines to follow while developing their budget. The budgets are built using a bottoms-up approach, where the planned spending for each cost account is individually developed. Any new positions or programs are included in the overall numbers, but are separately identified for ease of discussion.

* The individual budgets are loaded into the system, and then reviewed in total by the Superintendent. The Superintendent will then remove some items from the budget. New positions and new programs are areas that get the greatest scrutiny.

* The budget is distributed to the school board and the budget committee. It is reviewed in detail at an all-day Saturday meeting so that everyone involved has a common understanding of the issues.

* The school board then gives a reduction task to the administration to achieve a bottom line number. The administration revises the budget to meet the task amount. It is reviewed again to see the impact of the cuts. This process may be repeated as we home in on an appropriate bottom line number.

This year there were three iterations of the budget that occurred over several meetings. The first request made by Peter Bragdon was for a $400k reduction. The second request made by me was for a $180k reduction. The third request made by Len Mannino was for a final $50k reduction.

The progression of budget reductions was fairly typical, except for the fact that it took more time than usual. Each cut was more painful than the previous one, and it was more difficult to find areas to cut that would not have direct impacts on education delivery.

The final budget number we ended up at was $32,618,179 as compared to the default budget of $32, 455,230. The default budget is a calculation based on last year's budget plus spending changes that are legally mandated by law or contract, minus special items. Since there are some items that are excluded from the default budget that make sense to include, the fact that we are so close to the default budget shows that we are holding tight on the spending this year.

Some of the larger items excluded from the default budget but included in the proposed budget are things like raises for employees not part of a bargaining unit, and new equipment. We typically try to include raises each year for everyone to keep up with inflation. We also try to spend money each year on curriculum improvement as part of our planned improvement cycle where each major area is refreshed on a regular schedule that results in relatively level loading of improvement spending.

On a side note, Bob Willette had made a motion to reduce the budget by $50k just before Len's motion, but his was geared toward making the cuts in specific areas such as co-curricular activities. It is my philosophy to try to just manage to a bottom line number and not try to second guess the Administration as to the priorities for the spending. We all have our pet projects and areas, so it would be slippery slope if we start doing the cutting on a line item basis. One board member might want to preserve spending in one area and another member may have a totally opposite viewpoint. Once we start picking and choosing, then we would have trouble coming to an agreement on the items. Bob's motion failed due to lack of a second, so it appears that most other board members share my opinion on this.

I urge everyone to support the operating budget.