WINSLOW — If the Town Council finalizes the more than $197,000 cuts to the education budget at its next meeting, officials say, the Winslow School System will have to eliminate eight faculty and staff positions, including one elementary school teacher.
Eric Haley, the superintendent of Alternative Organizational Structure 92, presented those details to the council Tuesday evening during a joint meeting with the school board. He said that with the cuts the council asked to be implemented at its last regular meeting, the amount of additional money the school system needs from taxpayers is down from $678,000 to $481,000.
The council will take a second vote on the $23,591,388 municipal budget — with $15,453,384 going to education — on Monday in order to send it to voters this June; but if it stands, the town’s property tax rate will increase to $17.49 per $1,000 from the current $16.74. A resident living in a $140,000 median-value home will see a $105 increase in the property tax bill.
The intent behind the meeting Tuesday was so that the council could see the effect of $197,000 in cuts to the budget increase they asked the board to make before they take that final vote.
Those cuts include eliminating the position of a junior high librarian, not replacing a retiring second grade teacher, scaling back an employee who works part time as a teacher and part time as an education technician III, eliminating five education technician I’s who monitor lunch and recess, not refinishing a gymnasium floor and an auxiliary gymnasium floor, doing without some repairs and maintenance to sports fields and not buying new computers for technology staff. All those cuts amount to $197,758.
Before making those changes to the budget, school officials had made around $140,000 in cuts to attempt to lessen the increase in the budget. Those cuts included the purchase of a new bus and going without new textbooks and painting classrooms.
“That $197,000 hurts,” Haley said of the most recent cutbacks at the meeting. “We had to make some painful decisions.”
Kyle Price, the elementary school principal, said he hoped this meeting could be an opportunity to convince the council to support the budget previously presented without the personnel cuts.
“We worked hard through the whole process and we did everything we could not to get into the hard personnel cuts,” Price said. “This is big and deep for Winslow Elementary.”
One of the people who would be most affected by the cuts, first-grade teacher Jen Morneault, told the council that going through with the budget they voted on would not be in the best interest of the students.
Morneault, who has taught at the elementary school for nine years, will be the teacher internally filling the second-grade position that would not be replaced by a new hire, in turn leaving just three employees teaching first grade.
She said that she is happy to teach a new grade, but it’s about the numbers; with the behavioral problems she is seeing in children, it makes a student-to-teacher ratio of 18-to-1 an impossible challenge.
“I’ve seen a huge change in children. I don’t know what it is causing it, but something is changing,” she said. “The job now compared to nine years ago is less about reading, writing and math and more about dealing with PTSD, hunger, abuse, homelessness, sensory issues, autism.”
Morneault said that she has seven students with major behavioral problems who take up 90 percent of her time, and the rest of her students are not getting what they need from her. She said if the ratio of students to teachers increases, the problems will get worse.
She invited the councilors to sit in her class before they made their final decision.
“I wouldn’t want to come in and make a decision about someone else’s job without knowing what its like,” she said. “If you decide these cuts are really the only thing left to do, then at least you’ve done the due diligence and seen what it’s like.”
Emily Higginbotham — 861-9239
ehigginbotham@centralmaine.com
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