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Date: 4/13/2021
WORTHINGTON – The Worthington School Committee met on Apr. 8 to present and review the proposed budget for fiscal year 2022 (FY22).
The budget request for Annual Town Meeting is $1.2 million – a 3.9 percent increase from last year’s request.
Gretchen Morse-Dobosz, superintendent of schools, shared documents with participants that displayed the gross budget, planned expenses and adjustments. The gross budget is estimated to be just short of $1.5 million and the district anticipates utilizing $257,751 in adjustments.
Alison Todd, School Committee chair, explained, “The gross budget is all of our planned expenses. The adjustments column is where we offset the budget with various sources of revenue – some of them are grants, Circuit Breaker money, various things.”
She went on to say, “The gross budget minus the adjustments – we come up with the school budget request.”
Participants asked questions in regard to increasing teachers' salary due to their extensive and increased work during the pandemic. Elementary teachers’ salaries would increase 13 percent in the gross budget and 10.6 percent in the final budget request after adjustments.
Todd said, “We have a newly negotiated salary contract with the staff that we just agreed upon earlier this spring. It’s a three-year contract that builds annual increases for both years of service, levels of education and then a cost of living increase.”
Todd explained the building budget and expenditures as well.
She added there has been a significant increase in phone costs because they needed to pay for more internet capacity, however, the increase in the request is still only 1.51 percent. The total request for FY22 is $127,165.33.
School Committee members called the news “amazing.”
The School Committee will be reviewing the budget again before forwarding to the Annual Town Meeting.