PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Voters in Castle Hill, Chapman, Mapleton, Presque Isle and Westfield again rejected a school district budget and its property tax increase, putting the school board and administration back at the drawing board a month before students return.
During a July 21 district-wide referendum, SAD 1’s second proposed budget failed, facing the same fate as a budget referendum vote in June.
The latest rejected budget would have brought a 4.8 percent increase in the district’s annual tax assessment (split over two municipal tax years) and set aside funds to adopt all-day kindergarten in the coming years. The first budget, rejected in June, would have raised the tax assessment by 9 percent and launched all-day kindergarten this fall.
More than half of Castle Hill, Chapman, Mapleton and Westfield residents voted against the budget on July 21, as did more than two-thirds of the 528 Presque Isle residents who turned out.
The overall budget would have spent $24.8 million, an increase of 2.7 percent over last year, with $8.8 million coming from the district’s communities.
Now, SAD1 students may be back in school — high schoolers return Aug. 17 and grades pre-K-8 Sept. 1 — before the district has a finalized budget. Under that scenario, according to state law, the district would operate under the most recent budget that failed, since it was passed at a budget meeting, until a new one is adopted, said assistant superintendent Clint Deschene.
The district has 45 days from the date of the last vote to go through the three-step budget approval process: a board vote, a budget meeting vote, and a district-wide referendum.
The SAD1 board’s next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 3, at 5:30 p.m. in the Presque Isle Middle School Auditorium.
Putting together a new budget in a short time is going to be a challenge, Deschene said. A lot of the feedback he’s heard from people at meetings and online boils down to “Don’t cut services, but cut lots of money,” he said. “Staffing in the classroom is probably about as low as we can take it.”
Going beyond the budget, Deschene said that he, Superintendent Brian Carpenter and the school board are hoping to have meaningful conversations with members of the public about important decisions for the future — such as closing an underutilized school like Pine Street Elementary, which would be an 18-month process.
“We don’t want to make a short-term financial decision that ends up being more expensive in the long term,” Deschene said.
