Voke school budget hearing upsets Saugus selectman

SAUGUS – The Northeast Metro Technical School passed its budget with a slightly less than 1 percent increase, but Selectman Michael Kelleher was not impressed.”The budget meeting last week was disappointing,” he said. “The meeting left more questions than answers.”Kelleher is upset with the tuition charged to enroll Saugus kids into the Wakefield vocational school and has been attacking the issue on two fronts. The first is destined to be a lengthy battle in the State House to change the formula, which was devised under the Education Reform Act in 1993. The second plan of attack includes having a majority of the 12 communities that send students to the school reject the budget, which would force the School Committee to revisit the budget.The committee did vote 8-4 to approve the proposed budget, even after Kelleher said he stood with a representative from Reading to warn the committee that they had nine districts ready to reject it in their own communities.Saugus Selectman Peter Rossetti, who sits on the Northeast Metro’s School Committee, defended the school’s position.”We have a budget that has a little less than a 1 percent increase,” he said. “That’s an extremely low number.”Rossetti said the increase was comparable to other vocational schools that all seemed to have a matching 1 percent increase, 1 percent cut or, in one case, no change in the budget at all.Kelleher, however, argued that that any increase would come on top of last year’s 8 percent budget increase and that was unacceptable.Also unacceptable, Kelleher said, is the school’s administration-heavy staff.Kelleher said he doesn’t understand why a school with 1,300 kids needs a superintendent, a principal, two vice principals and a public relations person.With a shift in command coming, Rossetti said that one vice principal position would remain unfilled in the 2010 budget, as one of the current vice principals steps into the principal position, taking his vice principal duties with him.As for why it costs more to educate students at the vocational school, Rossetti said Kelleher needs to do his homework.”It doesn’t work the same as a (traditional) school,” he said.For example the school has a spray booth for its auto body class that must meet environmental standards and costs nearly $500,000. Likewise, Rossetti added, other classes have expensive equipment and teachers, some of them masters in their crafts, who need to be paid slightly higher to make the job worthwhile.”Some of these people, like plumbers, could be making more money on the job,” Rossetti said.Kelleher also took issue with that fact that much of the budget presentation was dedicated to comparing the costs of attending the school with other vocational schools, which he thought was unimportant.Rossetti pointed out that schools such as North Shore Technical School and Shawsheen Valley Technical were several thousand dollars higher than Northeast Metro.Kelleher said had he been able to ask more questions, he would have asked why the committee has a budget of $4,800 – or any budget for that matter – why the principal is making $500,000 and of course why Saugus pays over $2 million, which is more money for fewer students than 11 other communities pay.”The proposed 2010 budget was cut by $700,000 yet the cost to Saugus went up from $240,000 to $270,000,” Kelleher said. “Why? As I told the committee, this is unacceptable.”Rossetti, however, contends that Kelleher is simply not familiar with how the vocational school system works.