SAD1 budget to set aside money for all-day K
A new SAD1 budget is heading back to voters with a smaller tax increase and a plan to start saving for all-day kindergarten.
On July 19, voters in Castle Hill, Chapman, Mapleton, Presque Isle and Westfield will be asked to approve a new budget for Maine School Administrative District 1, after they rejected a budget with a 9 percent tax hike June 16.
At a June 30 special meeting, the SAD1 board of directors signed off on a new 2016-2017 budget proposal that would bring an annual property tax assessment increase of 4.8 percent for the district’s fiscal year. The overall budget would spend $24.8 million, an increase of 2.7 percent over last year, with $8.8 million coming from the district’s communities.
The budget voters rejected would have brought all-day kindergarten to MSAD 1, with a required increase in spending of more than $300,000 to pay for additional teachers and education technicians.
While that allocation along with a number of smaller items were removed to reduce the budget’s costs, the administration and board are still committed to adopting all-day kindergarten, something they say is the norm in Maine and the rest of country and is associated with long-term academic success. Nationally, more than 75 percent of kindergartners are in an all-day program.
At a meeting after the failed budget vote, the board agreed that they ultimately want to move to all-day kindergarten and discussed with superintendent Brian Carpenter the possibility of phasing it in with a limited number of students, such as those considered academically most at-need.
Now, the approach has shifted to a more patient option of saving money while waiting to adopt the program for all, which avoids a number of problems with a phased-in approach, Carpenter said.
“The administration felt that it was designating those students and marking them as low achievers,” Carpenter said of phasing in an all-day program for students deemed at-need based on pre-kindergarten assessments. A lottery system would also not be equitable, he said.
The budget is proposing (in article 19) to create an instructional reserve fund for all-day kindergarten, with up to $72,735 to be transferred into the account in the next school year from the regular instruction fund.
“We’re going to save for it,” said Carpenter, noting that the reserve fund could only be spent with authorization from the board and voters.
“I think the best option is to put away a little each year, with the approval of the board, and when it comes time to implement all-day K, we’ll have a reserve to do that.”
