Patrick’s plan kind to Lynn schools

LYNN – Gov. Deval Patrick’s $28 billion fiscal 2009 budget still has several hurdles to cross before becoming a reality, and with controversial additions such as $300 million in funding for casinos, that final number is all but guaranteed to change along its journey through the House and Senate in the coming months.With that in mind, Lynn Public School administrators are cautiously optimistic about a $6 million increase in Chapter 70 school aid that Patrick designated for the city, which would go a long way in helping to balance the books on the school side of the budget in 2009.Just one week after announcing he would add $368 million in total funding toward education, Patrick released his 2009 budget in its entirety Wednesday, including the exact figures for aid in each individual community, proposing a robust $117.6 million hike in Chapter 70 funds for Lynn’s public schools.”It is very encouraging,” Superintendent Nicholas Kostan said. “The numbers we are reading would give us roughly $6 million over last year, so obviously if we could ever get that amount we would be ecstatic. But we have to be cautiously optimistic and look at these numbers as preliminary, because they have a long way to go. Who knows what will happen in the House and Senate.”Kostan and School Business Administrator Stephen Upton have been preaching financial conservation over the last two months in preparation for an anticipated deficit heading into the 2009 budget season. The department has already placed a hiring freeze on vacant positions, and cut several line items from the 2008 budget to ensure that there will be something to carry over when the department begins to manipulate the figures for 2009.Despite the promising numbers released by Patrick on Wednesday, Kostan said the department would not change its thinking about the 2009 budget, and would continue to do whatever it can to save as much money as possible from now until the end of the school year.”We are going to stay the course and be as conservative as we can be,” he said. “We have to save as much money as we can from this year’s budget between now and the end of the school year because we are still going to need to apply that to next year’s budget.”Upton agreed with Kostan’s evaluation of Patrick’s proposal, and was also quick to note that even if the legislature approved Patrick’s budget as is, the district would still be looking at a deficit next year.”There are still some unanswered questions even in the information that has been given to us,” he said. “It is encouraging, but it is too early to know. We are still going to have a deficit, we are just not sure how much it is going to be.”One additional area of interest, particularly for Lynn, is Patrick’s proposed $67 million off-budget increase for school construction and renovation through the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). While that amount is not earmarked for any individual communities, Lynn is one of several districts that were overlooked for much needed school renovations in 2007.Despite glaring needs for safety and structural improvements at several schools in the city, the MSBA chose to overlook the department’s proposals in favor of other projects it deemed more worthy of funding. For now, the Marshall Middle School proposal remains the only school on the MSBA’s radar, and that project has been given “on hold” status until the proposal is reviewed later this year.If the $67 million increase is approved, it could open the door for additional school districts to obtain funding sooner, which may be cause for optimistic thinking for the Marshall project.After spending the afternoon reviewing the numbers, both Kostan and Upton praised the governor for supporting education with his numbers, but again warned that it is just too early to project the impact of his proposal on Lynn’s 2009 budget.”It gives us some preliminary info to go by along the way,” said Upton. “We would rather have good numbers in the Governor’s budg