WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Williamstown School Committee on Tuesday voted to send the town a fiscal 2018 budget that raises overall spending at the K-6 school by 2.39 percent.

 

The appropriated portion of the budget — the part paid by local property taxes — is up by 3.64 percent according to the budget presented at a Tuesday public hearing and approved by a unanimous of the committee moments later.

 

"We're intentionally trying to make sure the overall budget doesn't increase [by more]," said School Committee Chairman Joe Bergeron, who also serves on the panel's finance subcommittee. "We need to tuck more of the budget into the appropriated [side] because we don't have the reserves we've had in the past."

 

Bergeron and district administrators will make their case to the town's Finance Committee on Wednesday evening at Town Hall in hopes the Fin Comm will recommend the spending plan as drafted to May's annual town meeting.

 

On Tuesday, interim Superintendent Kim Grady explained that while the $6.8 million budget is up by just 2.39 percent from this year, the district anticipates $71,364 less in non-appropriated revenues. The FY18 budget has less revenue from state and federal grants, school choice, circuit breaker and pre-kindergarten tuition based on the best available information.

 

In fact, Grady warned, the non-appropriated side of the budget may drop by more even than the $71,463 currently projected.

 

"Our non-appropriated number for FY18 may change as other information is released from the state," she said.

 

While projected school-choice revenue is down by about $14,000, from $169,054 to $155,000, the budget proposes using $22,225 less of the school choice revenue than the school used in fiscal 2017 as the district attempts to slowly rebuild reserves. Prior to last year, the district used the school-choice reserve to cover increased operating expenses, allowing the hit to taxpayers to come in at 2.5 percent.

 

"You could advocate this is a truer budget than we've had in the past, advocating what our needs are," committee member John Skavlem said.

 

Last week, Bergeron noted that as recently as 2012, the district had $450,000 in reserves. The district started FY17 with $50,000 in the reserve account.

 

The FY18 budget passed on Tuesday puts an additional $21,091 of school choice revenue into the reserve account.

 

The budget also maintains services at the school and meets several of the priorities outlined in the district's School Improvement Plan, Grady and Principal Joelle Brookner told the School Committee.

 

"For a number of years, we didn't have to make cuts," Brookner said. "Last year was the first time substantial changes were made to the budget. We are keeping track of things that have gone away and prioritizing bringing them back."

 

Notable increases to the FY18 budget include updated reading texts in Grades K through 3, an increase in the paraprofessional budget to allow all paras' work days to begin when the school day begins and the return of a full-year assistant principal position.

 

Last year, assistant principal was cut down to a 10-month position, but it needs to be 12 months, Brookner said.

 

To make up for some of those increases, the budget includes a reduction in the number of school bus routes, combining two "in town" routes that literally saw the buses crossing paths with one another several blocks from the school. The budget also moves some of the expense for a mid-day pre-kindergarten bus to the non-appropriated pre-K tuition line.

 

The district also benefited from an unchanged expense for health insurance for employees. In recent years, hikes to that line item were a major driver in higher budgets. This year Berkshire Health Group, which manages the health insurance for a variety of municipal agencies in the county, moved employees to a deductible-based plan with lower premiums for the government bodies, including Williamstown.

 

This year's budget hearing saw none of the acrimony associated with the FY17 budget season, when the administration and School Committee drew fire over the decision to scale back the pre-kindergarten special education Side-by-Side program.

 

On Tuesday evening, committee members and Grady said the process has been smoother because of changes the committee implemented — chiefly the addition of a finance subcommittee recommended to the district by the town's Finance Committee. Bergeron, committee member Dan Caplinger, Grady and Brookner have met regularly to pore over the budget and refine the numbers before they went to the full committee.

 

Skavlem said another big help was Saturday morning's budget workshop, which drew about 20 constituents to talk about the budget in an informal setting for about an hour in the school's cafeteria.

 

"That was very constructive from our perspective as a School Committee and the public's standpoint as well," Skavlem said. "It was a new component this year as far as the process is concerned, and I commend Joe [Bergeron] for coming up with that."

 

The budgets for Williamstown Elementary School and Mount Greylock Regional School will be presented to the Williamstown Finance Committee at a 7 p.m. on Wednesday at Town Hall.