Thanksgiving week is a time for turkey, but this year it was also a time for Westford’s elected officials to begin talking turkey on a budget heading to Town Meeting voters next spring.
On Monday, Westford School Department Superintendent Bill Olsen presented a proposed budget request of $54,847,094 for Fiscal Year 2017. The request represents a 2.78 percent increase from Fiscal Year 2016 and would be just under half of the town’s entire budget appropriations for the fiscal year, which will run from July 2016 to June 2017.
Town Manager Jodi Ross has requested a 2.5 percent increase from the School Department, although Olsen indicated during his presentation to the School Committee that discussions with the Selectmen and Finance Committee are still in their early stages.
Within the proposed budget, approximately $3.7 million in other sources of income such as fees and state aid would be added to the amount to be appropriated at Town Meeting, and that total amount would see cuts and additions.
Noting expected enrollment decreases in lower grades, Olsen recommended the reduction of four full-time equivalent positions at the Crisafulli, Miller and Day Schools. Additionally, he projected that Westford’s public schools will require $86,000 less in energy costs and $50,000 less for out-of-district tuitions.
Olsen indicated that 70 percent of the proposed budget increases would be related to mandated special education requirements, with a projected 20 new special education students entering the school system next year.
Other proposed increases would include 1.4 new teaching positions at Westford Academy due to increasing enrollment there as well as providing 33 percent more funding to provide more hours toward four current curriculum coordinator positions.
Olsen’s proposed budget decreases totaled $595,782 with new budget requests totaling $478,290 and budget adjustments into the budget totaling $245,935.
Among those adjustments, the largest amount would go toward two full time positions which were previously funded by school choice funding in recent years. In this move, Olsen said he saw the school choice funding as a rainy day fund that should be kept in reserve to prevent significant additional budget requests if needed.
A day later, Ross presented an overview for her entire projected Fiscal Year 2017 budget, which would appropriate $72.6 million from tax revenue appropriated at Town Meeting and $38.1 million from other sources such as local excise taxes and state aid.
During this presentation, her 2.5 percent increase expectation for the School Department was briefly discussed along with a 0.92 percent increase for all other town departments.
Other significant points of interest included a projected eight percent increase required for employee health insurance costs, which could have been higher if not for concessions from town employees, as well as addressing town facilities in need of repair and “Other Post-Employment Benefits,” better known as OPEB.
Full copies of both budget presentations are available on the town website’s document management system and videos of both meetings are available on demand at westfordcat.org
