Revised schools plan would require $150K more in taxes

Kennebec Journal, April 5, 2007

(excerpt) Property taxpayers would be asked for about $150,000 more in taxes and a high school teaching position would be cut as part of proposed revisions to the school budget to make up for less-than-anticipated state aid.

School officials have also upped how much they're willing to take from the schools' reserve account by about $200,000 to offset expenses, all in an effort to fill a more than $700,000 gap between what local officials expected to get from the state and what the state expects to give.

However, despite the drive to fill that hole in the budget at least one new item has been put into the budget. About $11,000 to start a high school girls lacrosse team as a club sport was put in the budget. The lacrosse team funding would take the place of a previously proposed purchase of a piece of equipment to lift exercise mats, which would have cost about the same amount, according to Superintendent Cornelia Brown.

With the changes, which won approval in a straw vote of the Board of Education on Wednesday, the city's schools would be between $20,000 and $30,000 over what the state's Essential Programs and Services funding model claims is how much a school system of Augusta's size should spend.

"I'm not opposed to going to the City Council and saying 'This is what we believe is a responsible budget,'" said board member William Stokes. "We got less (state funding) that we anticipated, through no fault of our own. We've squeezed the waste and frivolity out of our school budget, and we need $147,000 more in taxes."