SAUGUS — The School Committee unanimously adopted the superintendent’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year on Thursday. The total amount comes to $36,242,973.
“This is by no means our total budget,” School Committee chair Michael Serino said. “We have what’s referred to as a Schedule 19, which includes benefits, insurance and a bunch of other things that aren’t covered by the town but are school related.”
Serino said that he knows there are a lot of things people want to see in the budget but that the school has limited resources.
“We’ll listen to suggestions and solutions that people have,” he said. “But understand at the end of the day we have a responsibility to the students of Saugus and the taxpayers.”
Serino said that the students remain the principal focus of the budget. But the district has to be fiscally responsible and have to separate the wants and the needs.
77.17% of the budget is going towards salaries, benefits and contractual obligations. With the inclusion of special education, the commitments eat up a little more than 88% of the budget.
“Our population has grown quite a bit, and it continues to grow every day,” School Committee member Thomas Whittredge said. “But we have a lot of kids coming through who don’t speak English. The state makes us put them in gen-ed classes, and now you have the teacher trying to teach them English and what’s going on in the classroom.”
Whittredge said that this takes the focus away from the other kids in the class and he wanted to know what was being done to combat that.
“We have two additional ELL (English Language Learners) teachers that are in the emergency assistant grant right now that are coming back,” Superintendent Michael Hashem said in response.
Whittredge mentioned that an enrichment program has been discussed for students and parents to help with this situation as well as with communication.
He also said that there needs to be a focus on reinvesting in education and the kids. To do that, he said that the school should follow the model of the town, which has been doing well financially under Scott Crabtree’s management.
“Before Mr. Crabtree got here, we didn’t have a library; it was closed. We didn’t have the Essex Street Fire Station; it was closed. People were getting laid off and we didn’t have any money in town. He came to town with a plan,” Whittredge said.
He added that while the town is thriving financially, the school has been in “dire straits” for some time. “We have to get the staff that we need first before we start looking elsewhere,” he said.
Committee member Ryan Fischer agreed with Whittredge. “Every year we come back and some years we have a monumental list of urgent needs and some years it’s just maintaining what we have,” Fischer said. “We have good budget years and bad budget years.”
Serino, Whittredge, and Fischer each noted the growth in the number of students the school has seen and how it has affected the budget.
“When we did the building project, we were informed that there could be a growth in population for students,” Hashem said.
“I completely agree with the budget,” committee member Stephanie Mastrocola said. “I don’t have any real problems with it. I wouldn’t even think about taking any money away from the teachers.”
She said she has tried to educate herself on what is occurring in the school system since she joined the committee. A few problems, in her view, have arisen. “We’re trying to teach these kids to be fluent in reading, and they’re coming into kindergarten and they don’t even know letters,” Mastrocola said.
She also highlighted the challenges that teachers have been facing and why everything on the budget is so important.
“I’ve gone line by line and there’s nothing to take away,” she said. “If anything, there’s just more to add. I would like to see more school safety.”
Serino said that once they get into the budget it will be important to exhaust all of their resources to see what the current funding is and what they can do with it.
Committee member John Hatch said that he wanted to thank the town meeting members that came to the budget meeting as the budget will eventually be brought to them for approval.
“I just want to say that you [Hashem] did a good job with the budget this year,” Whittredge said. “I know there could be a million other things that we need because, let’s face it, the high school needs more bodies, the middle school needs more bodies, everywhere we go we need more bodies.”
“You did a really good job getting what we critically need to take the next step,” he said.
