The Seymour Board of Education unanimously approved a $31,113,985 budget request for 2013 – 2014 Monday night.
The figure represents a year-over-year increase of $715,959, or 2.4 percent, and remained unchanged from the figure proposed to the board by Superintendent Christine Syriac earlier during Monday’s meeting.
Syriac’s budget would, among other things, add two teaching positions at the middle school, two part-time lunch and recess monitors at each elementary school, start a $5,000 pilot program to fund new clubs and after school activities, and start a cross country team at the middle school.
The request is a shift in strategy for the school board, which in the last three years asked voters for funding increases averaging nearly 5 percent. Voters repeatedly rejected those spending plans, eventually approving increases averaging 1.44 percent annually.
School board members hope that by going to voters with a more modest initial proposal from the start, they will be able to show residents that the school district is setting its priorities responsibly, and not just asking for an extravagant raft of new programs.
Making such “pie in the sky” requests in past years ended up setting the town’s schools back, school board member Fred Stanek said during the meeting.
“We hurt ourselves,” Stanek said.
“I like the idea of a more modest budget because that’s what the public will buy,” he said after the meeting. “The public, I think, will look at us as a Board of Education and a school district with more understanding.”
Board of Education Chairman Yashu Putorti pointed out after the meeting that the school district’s “level services” budget amounted to an increase of $511,593, and that new requests beyond that totaled only $204,366.
“We want to try to keep it as minimal as possible while getting the services we need, without going crazy,” Putorti said. “There’s a lot more stuff we could do, but this is the minimum that we need for this year and we hope the taxpayers agree with us.”
Of course, the Board of Finance has final say on the number that will go before voters at referendum.
Its chairman, Trish Danka, attended Monday’s meeting and pledged her support for the spending plan afterward.
“It’s a responsible budget,” she said. “They’re not coming in with an outrageous number with just a large wish list.”
“We do understand that increases cause an additional burden to taxpayers,” Syriac said during her presentation to the school board.
With that — and a request from First Selectman Kurt Miller to set a target of a 2 percent increase — Syriac said she asked school administrators to be creative in finding ways to reallocate funds they already had.
Doing so with grant funding already in place will allow for the district to add a part-time school counselor at Chatfield-LoPresti Elementary School and a full-time board-certified behavior analyst — both necessary given current caseloads, she said.
The district’s enrollment for next year is projected at 2,320, Syriac said, which would be 23 less than this year, though final numbers for kindergarten enrollment, estimated at 168, won’t be available until August.
Likewise, final figures for spending on employee health insurance won’t be in place until April. The budget approved Monday uses an increase of 5.9 percent as a “worst case scenario.”
