While it may seem as though last year’s budget season just ended, the 2017/2018 fiscal year budget season has already begun. On Jan. 9, Superintendent of Schools Paul Freeman shared with the Board of Education (BOE) his initial proposed budget of $59,059,136 for the coming year, an increase of $1,152,345 or 1.99 percent.

Freeman said this budget carries the lowest budget increase he has brought to the board in his time as superintendent. Last year’s final budget came in at a historic low ($57,906,791 or a 0.69 percent increase in spending) after three referenda left the BOE to trim $750,000 from its original requested budget.

Reflecting on last year’s contentious budget process, Freeman said he thought carefully about efficiencies, but also looked to restore some of what was cut last year and continue to focus spending in areas that would help the district’s performance.

“I have no intention of bringing you a status quo budget so every budget is going to make us better next year than we are currently this year,” he said. “On the other hand we don’t expect to ever come before you and say, ‘We are doing well this year and if you give us more dollars we will do better next year.’”

In crafting the budget, Freeman said he looked to strengthen the districts priorities of student engagement, high-quality teaching, and maintaining a health school environment through a series of initiatives focusing strengthening the professional learning community, mastery of high leverage practices, maintaining a balanced assessment system, continuing to support math instruction, and exploring the role of homework.

To maintain those priorities and keep the budget increase low, Freeman said he looked carefully at cost savings opportunities across the district. Freeman specifically pointed out recent negotiations with the district’s bargaining units that resulted in most employees moving to a high-deductible health plan, a move he said has generated significant savings.

Freeman said he looked everywhere for savings, even down to supplies and materials costs.

“Quite honestly this year we asked principals to look in their cupboards and if they have materials that are rolling over, not to restock materials that might be in their cupboards,” he said.

Maximizing savings in certain sections of the budget, such as salaries, which make up the single largest expense in the budget, can be more challenging. Salaries make up $747,397, or nearly half, of the proposed budget increase. Freeman said the increase has to do with teachers moving up the pay scale.

“Every time we look at a turnover in a position, we look to replace that position as thoughtfully and efficiently as possible,” he said. “Each time a staff member with some seniority leaves us, we look to hire in a staff member who has fewer years of experience and generates savings in that way.”

The budget includes adding 3.4 staff members (a number made possible by the compilation of part-time positions), including the addition of a full-time math coach. In prior years, the district employed six literacy coaches and one math coach; Freeman said the results of the literacy coaching are evident in student performance. This year he proposes shifting positions to employ five literacy coaches and 3.5 math coaches to bolster mathematics performance across the district.

“We are proud of our performance, but I would like to see our mathematics performance equaling or challenging our performance in English language arts,” he said.

The proposed budget also includes investments in new programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, the return of cheerleading, and the creation of a boys and girls swim team(read more here). For all of these programs, part of the cost is born by the families of the student in the form of exam costs or participation fees, with the rest of the tab included in the budget.

While not a part of the operating budget, Freeman also presented $3,585,777 in capital bonding requests for projects including renovations to the heating and cooling system at Baldwin Middle School that have been pushed off for years.

“Deferring again I believe would be a liability,” said Freeman.

Moving forward with the budget, both Freeman and the BOE agreed they need to keep an eye on the state. Just before the New Year, the state handed down midyear budget cuts to municipalities and Guilford lost $171,845 in Education Cost Sharing (ECS) money, a program that serves as the state’s primary financial resource to help municipalities run their schools.

“It will require us to monitor our budget much more carefully from here up to the end of the year,” said Freeman. “We do not see it as being a catastrophic loss to our operations this year [but] it is not good news and we will work very carefully around it...We don’t expect it to impact students.”

BOE Chair Bill Bloss said the district should expect less funding from the state in the future, but he said with only about eight percent of the education budget coming from state and federal grants, it’s going to be difficult for the state to try and tell towns like Guilford how to run their schools.

“There is an argument that as state aid is reduced, there is less moral force for the state directing us to do things that they refuse to fund,” he said. “I think there is a movement toward taking the opportunity to say, ‘If you were funding us at 20 percent of the budget, that would be one thing, but you are not so…’”

The first public hearings for the BOE budget are Monday, Jan. 23 and Tuesday, Jan. 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Elizabeth C. Adams Middle School, 233 Church Street, in the Chorus Room. To learn more about the budget, visit the district budget website page www.guilfordps.org.