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Date: 2/2/2022
LUDLOW - With budget season looming, the Ludlow School Committee discussed the current state of the budget and some of the grants they received to help the district financially.
To start the budget discussion, Senior School Business Administrator Christopher Desjardins discussed the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds (ESSER) and said a portion of that had to be spent immediately.
“The one thing I will say about this grant is 20 percent of it had to be spent on mental health issues, so there was $600,000 of it right off the bat that needed to go toward mental health issues, so we have utilized those funds toward that and the rest will be used over the next couple years to pay for staff and facilities upgrades,” he said.
Along with the mental health support funding, Desjardins said the rest of that money will be spent on salaries and other projects, but eventually that money will run out.
“There is quite a bit of staff being paid from this account and I am not going to lie there is going to be that funding cliff coming up because you cannot just have this much money in the budget and then take it out and not realize it did not affect us at all. That is one of the reasons I am trying to keep this funding available between a circuit breaker and the school choice account,” he said.
Desjardins said the district also pays some employees out of the school choice funds.
“We just moved three people’s salaries that were being paid from school choice out of that account and into the regular budget today to build up a little bit of the safety net that we will keep. Sometimes that school choice account looks big and it looks like we cannot use it, but we should not use it until we need it,” he said. “We are working on making sure that cliff is minimized as we move forward.”
Speaking of School Choice, committee Chair Michael Kelliher said a portion of that budget goes toward technology expenses.
“We have been dedicating $50,000 a year for the last 10 years and we started building out our wireless infrastructure and things like that, but we have that dedicated funding stream. Because Chromebooks are relatively inexpensive, we have been able to manage it between that and our regular budget,” he said.
After committee Vice Chair James Harrington discussed challenges finding substitute teachers, Desjardins said the district would not spend the entire budget before the end of the school year.
“For substitutes we are not really close to spending the entire budget. I did some calculations today where I thought we would end the year at and what I do is I take the budget and go through each line to see what expenses are going to be encumbered, so with the available budget for substitutes we anticipate about $140,000 to be spent and we would still be within the budget,” he said.
Desjardins said one of the biggest struggles in the substitute teacher budget is finding substitute paraprofessionals.
“The one thing we are struggling with is finding para-substitutes, that is the area that has been a challenge and it has been such a challenge that the [Special Education] Director has had to hire an outside service that will bring in paras for us. It is good that we can fill the positions that way but it is bad because it is significantly more expensive than actually having an employee,” he said.
While the district has been able to pay for the paraprofessionals through grants, Desjardins said the district will be paying on its own after January.
Kelliher added that in order to prevent budget problems, the district has been careful around building budgets and purchasing supplies.
“The past couple years the building based budgets have been frozen basically at the beginning of the year because we were so concerned about budgetary problems and we want to be careful about how we spend money on supplies. We are being very careful about how we have been doing things and we have been fortunate with some of the larger grants because our expenses have gone up dramatically with COVID between additional staff and technology we had to purchase so we were fortunate to have that,” he said.
During the meeting Interim Superintendent Lisa Nemeth also provided an update on the falling COVID-19 cases across the district.
“The week before the last School Committee meeting there were about 175 cases, we had 80 this past week so we definitely have dropped and cases are continuing to fall,” she said.
Nemeth explained that one continuing challenge with COVID-19 is the constant changes in information and protocols.
“DESE is having another meeting in regard to new testing options so every week things are changing and very difficult to keep up. Our nursing staff is doing an incredible job, it is very disheartening sometimes when you just think you understand all the updates with COVID and they switch or throw something in,” she said. “We are still hanging in there, we are still coming to school, we are still doing the best we can and we are here for the students.”
While other districts have opted for the state’s new COVID-19 test policy Nemeth said the district is still weighing its options.
“We are still investigating it, I know some of our surrounding communities are moving forward with it, but I just talked to some of them this morning and what they were promised by DESE is not coming through, so I am glad we have slowed down a little bit and we are watching the trends before we jump in,” she said. “I think we are in a good position here in Ludlow that we have things under control, our nursing staff is incredible and we are doing everything we should be at this point without starting something new.”
The committee also approved the calendar for the 2022 to 2023 school year.
The Ludlow School Committee next meets on Feb. 8 and coverage of that meeting will appear in the Feb. 17 edition of The Reminder.