SAD 48 considers next series of cuts

NEWPORT – SAD 48 Budget Committee members will try Thursday to determine where the next $100,000 in budget cuts will be made. At an emotion-charged meeting last week, directors voted to send a proposed budget to referendum on Sept. 9 and to cut $100,000 from the most recent $17 million proposal.

The meeting Thursday will be held at 7 p.m. in the Nokomis Regional High School cafeteria.

But it was determining what was going to be eliminated that stymied the group. So many proposals have come before the board that even the directors at times appeared confused about which programs had been given the axe and which remained intact.

At Thursday’s meeting, the Budget Committee will hear recommendations from Superintendent William Braun and suggestions from the public before it makes a final plan.

Over the past two months, SAD48 voters have twice turned down budgets proposed by the board by 2-to-1, the first at $17 million and the second $100,000 less. The message voters appear to be sending, taken from comments at public hearings and recent fliers distributed in the district, is that the portion of education funding taken from property taxes is too great.

Supporters of the school budget say that fight belongs and is being waged in Augusta and that repeated decimation of the local school funding will only result in hurting the district’s children’s education.

“I don’t think this is about [budget] numbers,” said Braun. “This goes way beyond the economy. This goes way beyond education. This goes way beyond what is good for our kids. We are now way beyond anything one would imagine.”

Braun said that last week’s discussion was helpful, since he learned what those in the audience and the directors did not want cut. “They want to retain the assistant principals,” he said, referring to the elimination of posts that would have saved the district $17,500.

The board also voted against a proposed pay-for-play system for extra-curricular programs, such as band and sports, which could have increased revenue by $40,000 a year.

“But I don’t have any good answers yet,” Braun admitted Monday morning.

Braun said he has not had any formal notice from SAD 38 about its contract to educate secondary students in SAD 48. The 90 to 100 students sent to Nokomis each year equate to about $450,000 in revenue. Should the budget continue to be cut, and SAD 38 opt to send their students elsewhere, SAD 48 “would not be able to recover,” Braun said.

At last week’s meeting, SAD 38 representative to the SAD 48 board, Philip Dolan, said that many parents were considering pulling their tuitioned secondary students from Nokomis Regional High School and some already had made other arrangement because of the deep educational cuts already made.

At last week’s meeting, Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron said that she had conducted a three-year analysis of where the SAD 48 budget had increased. “Your instructional costs – teachers, textbooks – have remained flat,” she said. But she pointed to the construction of two new middle schools as the reason that facilities operation costs are up and debt service is significantly higher.

Gendron pointed out that SAD 48 residents pay 10.38 mills for education, while the state average is between 10 and 11. A proposed cap of 10 mills, to be voted on by the Legislature later this month, would save the district about $200,000, based on the current budget.