CARIBOU, Maine – RSU 39 school board members approved a $23.3 million fiscal year budget Wednesday night featuring fewer staff cuts than the district initially anticipated.
Board members Jan Umphrey-Tompkins and Lou Willey were absent. Remaining board members Lindsey Theriault, Betheny Anderson and Tanya Sleeper approved the budget unanimously.
The $23,354,101 budget is a 5.9% increase from last year’s total of $22 million. The new budget will now go to a district budget meeting May 22.
If passed without changes, the budget will include a 1.98 mill increase from last year’s local education mill rate of 11.31 mills per $1,000 of property value to 13.29 mills.
The board’s vote came after a dozen teachers, staff members and students spoke out against proposed cuts last month, which would have included several teachers from Caribou Community School and Caribou High School. The newly passed budget will only eliminate four positions rather than the 18 originally proposed.
Had no cuts been made to last year’s budget, the fiscal year 2024-2025 budget would have totaled $24,988,850, a $2.9 million, or 13.3-percent, increase, and resulted in a 6-mill increase in the district’s portion of the mill rate, said RSU 39 Superintendent Jane McCall.
The first round of cuts eliminated $855,209 from the initial budget, including $492,500 in capital improvement projects; a decrease in non-union employees’ pay increases from 5 percent to 2 percent, which equaled $58,663 in wage cuts; $76,950 from technology resources; and moving a proposed assistant superintendent position from full time to part time, removing $68,000 from that salary line.
If the district wanted to cap the proposed mill rate increase to .5 mills, that would have meant eliminating 18 staff positions, a total of $1,492,300 in wages and benefits, from the budget in a second round of cuts.
Other cuts would have gone to custodial services, $67,000; the remaining assistant superintendent salary, $68,000; student clubs and organizations, $5,600; and athletics, $22,500; and taken $1,686,600 from the total district budget.
“After seeing what [the teacher cuts] would do to students and their education, the school board decided to let [Business Manager] Mark Bouchard and I look at adding positions back and going for a 2-mill increase,” McCall said.
While reviewing the district’s finances again, Bouchard found that $300,000 in revenue had been unintentionally placed in the wrong category, meaning that the district could now use those funds to avoid more cuts, McCall said.
On Wednesday, the school board approved eliminating one district information technology technician, an alternative education teacher at Caribou High School, an Innovation Center ed tech at Caribou Community School and a grade six teacher at Caribou Community School.
The district also is cutting $34,200 from the Gifted and Talented program and $681,500 from facilities maintenance, including $355,500 from capital improvement projects, such as replacing the high school gym roof, paving the high school student parking area, floor tile replacement at the technology center, and removing two unused boilers at the high school.
The grade six teacher position is currently vacant, meaning only three full-time staff members will be losing jobs.
Caribou resident Rachel Bourgeois, who has two children attending Caribou Community School, spoke against eliminating the sixth grade teaching position, which will leave three sixth grade teachers this fall.
“Cramming more students into classrooms that are already full and adding more students to the remaining teachers’ rosters is not what we want for our children,” Bourgeois said. “When we lower the number of teachers while the student population continues to grow, we’re lowering our standard.”
The Maine Department of Education bases its allocations to school districts on student population trends and local property valuations, McCall noted.
Caribou High is projecting an increase in seven students next fall, bringing their total population to 449 students. Caribou Community School currently expects to lose 11 students, giving them 759 next fall, McCall said.
The state will allocate $16,559,632 to the district in 2024-2025, with Caribou expected to raise $2,707,911 as its required local share and Stockholm $120,594. District leaders are proposing to raise an additional $2,429,561.
Last year, the state provided $15,973,838, with Caribou raising $2,702,385 and Stockholm $124,066.
But despite increased state funding, wages and benefits for union contracted employees, including teachers, have risen, and make up 81 percent of the district’s budget. The 3-year average for property valuations has also increased by $21,750,000 and is now $427,266,667 total, McCall said.
Anderson said that it has become more difficult to balance the need to provide adequate staffing with the need to lower the burden on local taxpayers. She did not want to see young teachers lose their jobs but also heard stories of local senior citizens struggling with higher taxes.
The school board approved the following budget warrant articles: regular instruction, $7,364,973; special education; $2,903,874; career and technical education, $2,039,804; other instruction, $615,603; student and staff support, $1,696,494; system administration, $818,627; school administration, $822,904; transportation and buses, $1,210,934; facilities maintenance, $2,416,367; debt service and other commitments, $3,356,070; nutrition, $108,447; and annual payments for non-state-funded school construction projects, $186,098.
Members of the public can vote on the proposed budget Wednesday, May 22 at 5:30 p.m. at the Caribou Performing Arts Center. If passed, the budget will go to a referendum ballot vote on Tuesday, June 11 in Caribou and Stockholm.
Correction: A previous version of this story misquoted school board member Betheny Anderson.
