Lets Save the School Committee Some Big Money

The Dracut School Committee, after reviewing the proposed budget for an additional 2 weeks, has voted to accept the proposed budget as their “working document.”

This document is what will go into negotiation with the town as we move towards a new town budget for the upcoming year.

It was sort of funny watching them spend 15 minutes voting to separate a number of line items so that Joe Campbell, Ron Mercier, and May Paquette would not have a “conflict of interest” in voting for budget items involving members of their own families. Hopefully all three of them are in different unions, or we could have a tough time in the future getting a majority vote to approve a contract.

This School Department budget calls for an increase in total spending from last year of over 6%.

The town doesn’t get any more than 2-1/2 percent (plus growth) a year in increased revenues. Growth in the towns has been slowing over the last few years (and is projected to continue to go down as less property is available for developement). We cannot afford a 6% increase in one-half of our town budget.

This feels, once again, like an Ed King proposal.. ask for six percent, settle for two.

The Superintendent, in presenting the budget, once again harkened back to the 2002 budget year where “we were cut one million dollars.” I seem to remember that year that they asked for a 1.5 million dollar increase and got 600,000 after negotiating with the town.

Now, as I look back over the last 5 or 6 years, I looked at the school enrollment figures and the trend is fairly flat. Since the 2000/2001 school year, we have gained 58 students.

58.

Since that point in time, we have added portable classrooms to the highschool and made improvements to all the schools. This year we lost the portables at the Parker, reducing that school by 2 classrooms.. and the kids were easily absorbed into another school.

Oh, and by way, during this 6 year period we built a new school that can handle well over 700 students (I thought it was supposed to be able to take on 900).
For two years, we lent out one wing of that school to the library and now it remains vacant.

Last year, when the school department came to us with a “bare bones” budget, they later finished the year with a new Executive Director of Special Education, a Business Manager, another Curriculum Director, and a new Supervisor of Fine and Performing arts.

So, before we start looking at additional spending, maybe we should look at some serious “out of the box” ideas to reduce spending at the schools.

I think one of the best moves we could make in the immediate future is to finally close down one of the older elementary schools.

The Parker Elementary School (especially after the mold problem this year that eliminated the two portable units) only accomodates about 120 kids. At the cost of building maintenance, utilities, insurance, and administrative costs, I don’t see why we don’t merge these children into some of the other elementary schools.

This would reduce the costs to the town of one full operational building.

An even more interesting choice would be the Greenmont Avenue school. It only accomodates 260 students, yet has a prime location and property size that could accomodate a town building (town hall?) or commercial business, or residential development.

Both of these old buildings are nowhere near what would be acceptable today in building a school. They are difficult to heat and have significant long-term costs with respect to maintaining the old structures (and I have to doubt the Greenmont meets with the ADA standards.. but I haven’t been in there in years).

I think the cost savings of closing one of these two structures would be significant, and we could better educate our kids in the more modern facilities we have around the town.