Letter: SAD 4 budget is best for our kids
To the Editor;
I am writing this letter to implore you to go out and vote in favor of the new school budget on November 8th. The children of our district need to know, the community supports their schools.
I want to say, as a Board, we have all worked very hard to bring the best budget to the citizens of our district. Regardless of what you might hear, we do this job for the kids of this district. We are not doing it for the administration or ourselves. Just because one vocal person doesn’t agree with what we do or how we do it, it doesn’t mean it is wrong or a bad budget. This person has a different way of doing a budget and feels their way is the only way to do things.
We, as a community, should want to provide the children of SAD 4 the best possible education that they can get. Everyone has to help out with this, both young and old. Only a strong community can lift up these kids and make anything and everything possible for them.
The fact is that the budget is less than what it was last year and the local additional has been cut to a 0 net increase to the towns. All towns have given out their tax bills and the change in the latest budget will be a decrease in the amount of money the schools have been requesting. These bills were sent out on a prior passed budget and now it is lower. No one wants to pay more in taxes, but doesn’t it make sense to pay for something that we can be proud of (our schools and the children) and that might bring more people to our area to live, instead of driving them to other schools.
We were able to do this 0 percent increase to the towns by carrying over some fund balance. Many people have insinuated that this money was being hidden from the public. Not true! Since we are so late in getting the budget passed, we have ended the previous school year budget and now have money that we can move forward with. We do not practice guessing at what we will have to move forward. This can be dangerous to do. If for some reason we don’t have that money we said we would have, we would be in a hole. It is very hard to dig yourself out of that type of hole as area districts have demonstrated.
The Board did decide to add a new administrative position — an Assistant Principal/Activities Coordinator to be shared between the buildings. This position will help with the daily duties of running the buildings and working with the students; thus allowing the principals to work on teacher evaluations, testing, and curriculum. These responsibilities were formally the job of the curriculum coordinator.
As a Board, we felt the restructure of adding the Assistant Principal to work directly with the students verses a Curriculum Coordinator who mainly works through the central office and with teachers. If the general public has not been in a school in years, they may not understand this great need. There are many children and families in crisis that need the assistance of an adult on a daily basis. There are many state and federal mandated programs that need to be run. Building principals cannot handle it all. Schools are certainly not the same schools that many of us remember.
The Board, in the near future, will schedule meetings and workshops to start working on a strategic plan for our district. We will be asking local officials, parents, and community members to help us out with the future of SAD 4. We hope that we can start having good dialogue on what our communities want to see for the future.
Thank you for the continued support of our great schools.
Cindy Hoak
SAD 4 board chair