Aliyya Swaby Photo
De La Paz, Harries.
Board of Education members unanimously approved a $231 million budget for next year — but are far from pinning down all its components.
The board unanimously voted at its regular meeting Monday night at Beecher School to approve an operating budget of $231,527,055 for the next fiscal year, including a request for $5 million more from the city for the general fund.
Just one more committee meeting separates them from a budget hearing at the Board of Alders April 21, where district officials will have to defend their numbers and their request for additional funding. The alders have ultimate authority to approve or reject the school budget.
The board will likely not be done with the process before that hearing, said Darnell Goldson, who heads the Operations and Finance Committee, which hosted most of the budget discussions. Goldson has requested that each school principal deliver to the board his or her school budget, funding priorities and assessment of needs, before the process continues.
If they do not deliver those by next Monday’s committee meeting, committee members will have to decide how to proceed and approach the Board of Alders, he said.
Alders will have a summary budget proposal at the hearing, distributed to the board and public Monday, said Superintendent Garth Harries. It includes the basic cost increases and cuts the board is considering. At this point there is no detailed list of expenses.
“Our hope is that that’s enough for the alders to feel comfortable supporting the resources in the next budget, which is clear is not even enough for us to just keep the lights on, given cost increases,” he said.
The current process is “being governed by a very active Board of Ed, different than in the past, that this Board of Alders has helped to create,” Harries said. Last year, the Board of Ed approved a budget two days before the hearing at the Board of Alders, after lots of discussion but little pushback from ed board members.
The request for an increase in city funding is intended to cover $6.5 million cost increases in staff and services contracts, according to Chief Financial Officer Victor De La Paz and Harries’ proposal.
Since the $5 million will not cover the increased costs and allow for investments in new initiatives, district officials and board members have been discussing various strategies to cut costs, a few of which made it into the proposal, including:
• Declining to renew leases for two Head Start centers being consolidated into the Reginald Mayo Early Learning center next year, as well as for St. Stanislaus Church, now that New Haven Academy’s new building on Orange Street is constructed. This would cut $943,000.
• Cutting at least $522,000 from central office department budgets.
• Reducing the food service general fund subsidy by an additional $400,000.
• Cutting a $135,000 principal salary from Polly McCabe as it goes from a school to a program without a building next year.
A proposal to charge $750 in per pupil tuition to suburban districts sending students to New Haven was tentatively accepted at last Monday’s committee meeting, then stalled at a special meeting last Thursday.