School Budget Could be Reduced

It's been no secret that Winchester is facing a budget deficit in the next few years, which is why they're looking at a in March. But in order to try and lower its deficit for Fiscal Year 2012 the town has asked all departments to look at

That request has also been placed on the school department.

The and senior management has asked the schools to look at how its budget will look given certain parameters.

"It's important to understand what the different levels of the budget would look like," said

The current school budget is based off a 4.05 percent growth, which adds 1,405,264 on the FY '11 budget, bringing the FY '12 number to $36,086,824. The town has asked the School Committee to look at reducing the budget to 3.5, 3 and 2.8 percent growth.

According to McAlduff, the School Committee would like to see a budget increase of $1,766,545.

"That's the amount we need to keep the schools functioning where they are now," McAlduff said. "So, we already see a gap and that's going to be a challenge to close."

The Board is also asking the schools to identify operating budget reductions assuming that there will be no free cash used in FY '12 and the operational override fails. The Board said that the split of the costs between the school and municipal budget in this case would be 65 percent to 35 percent, which would lower the school budget by $1,979,000.

McAlduff expressed concern of having the school department carry that 65 percent burden.

"I'd like to see the details of a 65-35 split," McAlduff said. "That's a $2 million loss in our budget if the override fails. If they cut 65 percent of our budget that's 40 percent of the entire town's budget. If they do that we need to be given access to employee benefits and the maintenance budget."

The Superintendent also said that to maintain the minimum components to run the department would cost $1,272,246 without including special education.

Nearly $500,000 of the school's budget is focused on special education. And those costs are mandated by the state, so if the school department's budget is decreased the special ed. budget would not be affected.

"We need to provide special education services," McAlduff said. "And in order to provide those needs we will have to reallocate our resources from other parts of the budget."

The discussion of budget reductions is only preliminary at this point, and with an operational override in March, those numbers could very well be different.