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Date: 4/13/2022
WEST SPRINGFIELD — School Committee members approved a $48,886,975 budget for the coming year at their April 5 meeting.
The budget represents a 5.66 percent increase over the current year’s $46.27 million in spending, but school administrators pointed to a couple of million-dollar changes that account for most of the rise.
In a report delivered on March 8, School Business Manager Kim Hunter highlighted the massive increase in out-of-district tuition fees for special education students. That line item has jumped from $3.87 million in the current school year to $5.2 million in the proposed budget.
“We’re up 50 percent, year in, year out, on high school referrals, which is not normal,” School Superintendent Timothy Connor said last month. “A lot of those have to do with social-emotional [health] and anxiety and depression. … Kids are coming off a pandemic.”
He also noted that three students who moved into town in the past year, and who required special education services that the local schools could not provide, accounted by themselves for $478,000 of the increased spending.
Hunter said another reason for the 5.66 percent increase in the bottom line is the elimination of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds — grants from the pandemic relief bills passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021 — from the operating budget. Last year’s budget was balanced with $1 million from ESSER. This year, the district’s remaining ESSER aid will be treated as a separate fund for one-time expenses. The ESSER money must be spent by fiscal 2025.
School Committee members voted 6-0 to endorse the plan, with Mayor William Reichelt, who chairs the committee, abstaining. The school budget will next go before Reichelt and the Town Council, which can choose to accept or reject it as part of the overall town budget deliberations. The new fiscal year begins July 1.
The proposed school budget includes scheduled salary increases for individuals based on longevity and education, but does not include across-the-board pay raises for the four employee unions that are currently negotiating contracts — teachers, paraprofessionals, nurses and clerical workers.
“We will have changes” when those contracts are done, Hunter said last week.
Coburn on pace, Memorial next
Also at the April 5 meeting, Connor updated the School Committee on several elementary school building projects in the works. The Coburn School project is now 66 percent completed, he said — and the building will be finished at 88 percent, as the final 12 percent is razing the current Coburn School. Classrooms are taking shape and school staff who have been able to walk through the site are finally able to envision what their classrooms will look like, he said. The school is expected to open on schedule this fall.
Planning is underway for the next school building project, a classroom addition to Memorial School that will allow the school to serve English language learning students and kindergartners from its neighborhood. Connor said he expects construction at Memorial School to begin next year.
Also on the priority list are new playground equipment at Tatham School, repaving the Tatham parking lot and a re-engineering of the parking lot and traffic flow at Fausey School.
Connor said the School Department is also proceeding with an elementary schools facility needs plan, to look at the long-range building needs. District officials have discussed closing the town’s kindergarten center at John Ashley School and having all kindergartners attend their neighborhood elementary schools — a move that is already starting with the new Coburn School — and ending the use of modular classrooms. The study will also look at whether any elementary schools need to be closed or expanded.