BRISTOL — Voters at the Feb. 2 deliberative session increased the bottom-line budget that will appear on the ballot for the Newfound Area School District, hoping to restore funding for such things as the late bus serving athletes and students in the after-school program, which administrators had removed in order to have enough money under the tax cap to take on the repaving of the access road to the high school.
Prior to the amendments increasing spending levels, voters overwhelmingly rejected an amendment that would have reduced the proposed budget by $1.2 million — a figure based on the amount of money remaining this year after accounting for planned expenditures such as teachers’ salaries. Last year’s unassigned fund balance at the end of the fiscal year was nearly $1.5 million, and the district on average has had more than $750,000 at year’s end.
With the deliberative session attracting enough voters to fill more than three-quarters of the seats in the high school auditorium, they gave a clear indication that they support school spending, even if it means increasing taxation beyond the amount allowed under the district’s 2 percent tax cap.
By the end of the meeting, the final figure for the operating budget was $23,424,980, representing $58,488 more than the Newfound Area School District Budget Committee had recommended spending. If voters reject that article at the polls on March 12, the default budget that would take effect is even higher, at $23,562,107 — a figure that exceeds the tax cap.
The mood of the meeting was established early when Bristol resident Don Milbrand introduced a successful amendment to increase the amount that can be placed in the expendable trust fund for building maintenance from the $200,000 proposed to $350,000. The money would come out of any money remaining at year’s end and would be less if the unexpended fund balance did not allow it.
School Board member Suzanne Cheney of Alexandria said the school board had traditionally placed $60,000 into the trust fund and it put $100,000 into the fund two years ago. It placed no money in the fund last year, but she said it currently has $330,000 in non-lapsing funds.
“It’s been traditionally used almost as an emergency fund,” Milbrand said. “I hope to keep putting in a set amount and see them start using it for maintenance. At the budget presentation, a number of people spoke on the disrepair of some buildings.”
Voters did not have the option of changing the figure in the article to fund the cost items in the new three-year teachers’ contract, but they did discuss it, questioning how much of a raise the contract provided. While the overall cost increase is 1 percent in the first year and 1.25 percent in the second and third years of the contract, individual teachers might receive between 1 and 5 percent, with the average increase being 3.8 percent.
To put that into perspective, English teacher Sarah Cutting said she is at the top of the pay scale and would get a $610 annual raise, or $2.37 more per day.
Operating Budget
School Board Chair Jeff Levesque of Groton introduced the budget article, saying, “What we had to do to get there was kind of depressing.” He described the reduction of school supplies, elimination of an English-Language Arts teacher, the late bus, and other items. “The tax cap locks us down to a number that doesn’t meet our minimum needs,” he said.
When Dana Torsey of New Hampton asked how much remained of the current-year budget, Levesque said it is a little more than $1 million, which led to Bristol resident John Sellers proposing the $1.2 million reduction in the budget.
“The teachers and staff are doing a great job,” Sellers said, “and the administration has done a good job to save that money.” However, he said, with declining student enrollment, it is time for the school district to start looking at the consolidation of resources.
Milbrand spoke against the amendment. “Last year, I would have supported this amendment,” he said. “The budget committee and school board seemed to be out of control, but now it’s come to today. Let’s give a vote of confidence to the budget committee: They looked at the needs, and came up with a good budget. and they didn’t go all the way to the tax cap.”
Levesque said that the $1.2 million that remains in this year’s budget serves to handle “fluctuations and incidentals” that come up during the year, such as special education costs.
“There’s no hidden money,” he said. “For grants, we estimate what it will be and sometimes we get money we didn’t know about. With adequacy aid, we get an estimate, but we don’t know exactly what we’ll get. We get tuition from out of district. Sometimes a staff member leaves and we replace them with someone lower on the scale. We look for greater efficiencies, and there’s money we save by operating efficiently. But we’ve caught all the low-hanging fruit. We budget a year in advance and don’t know what we’ll be faced with.”
A number of residents spoke of the things the district has not done and said that cutting the budget further would harm the students’ education.
Cheney pointed out that the school budget has increased only 3 percent in the last eight years, and she said that, with more young people now deciding to stay in New Hampshire, the trend of declining enrollments is likely to reverse.
Sellers’ amendment went to a ballot vote, resulting in a 34-182 defeat.
Budget committee member Don Franklin of Hebron attempted to increase the budget by $213,353 to fund the paving of the high school parking lot, an item on the capital improvement project plan which the school board had planned to complete with money from the building maintenance trust fund. Having just increased the amount potentially going into that account, voters rejected Franklin’s amendment.
That was when voters began restoring things the school board had eliminated in order to stick with the district’s capital improvement program calling for the repaving of Newfound Road.
Bob Brooks of Hebron offered a successful amendment to add $21,000 for the outdoor speakers that Superintendent Stacy Buckley had proposed as a safety measure to let students know if something should occur making it unsafe to re-enter the building. Brooks’ amendment also added $5,600 for athletic uniforms which Coach John Larson said would replace old uniforms that don’t properly fit the athletes.
Another amendment, by a Bristol resident, restored the $31,888 for the late bus that originally was offered to transport students taking part in the grant-funded after-school program, Project Promise. The bus also serves students staying after school for band and athletic practices.
Petitioned Articles
Voters also discussed two petitioned articles that grew out of the acrimony of the past year following the school board’s precedent-setting decision to include capital improvement program expenditures in the default budget. The board argued that, because voters had previously approved the replacement of the high school roof, which was included in the CIP plan, it was not a “one-time expenditure” as voters had assumed, but was part of ongoing maintenance that could be included in the default budget.
Because the school board held to that interpretation in the face of strong opposition from taxpayers, residents submitted two petitions — one to give residents a chance to vote separately on large capital expenditures, and the other to transfer responsibility for calculating the default budget to the budget committee.
Petitioned articles cannot be amended, so they will appear as presented on the March 12 ballot.
